Roller Skate Wheels Under Nose..Q

I've seen a car with it some time ago. Kind of made me laugh until I saw how well it worked....

 

I know my husband Wil is toying with the idea for his hand-built roadster. We've seen it in the shop before and he thinks its a good idea.

Sandy

 

Why not just little aluminum strips? May be much easier to attach, and will slide no prob. I've seen many race trucks with aluminum strips at the end to "slide" over angled roads.

 

Wheels won't damage the surface of your driveway.

 

How about sacrificial delryn strips...

Of course, none of these solutions will prevent the spoiler from deforming or tweaking if you attempt too steep a climb.

 

The car I'm building has super low ground clearance so it has skate board wheels under the nose. I bought two articulating trucks and four urethane wheels from a skate board supply web site. I then engineered mounting brackets under the car about one quarter of the way back between the front air dam and the front wheels. They also extend down slightly below an imaginary line between the bottoms of the front tires and the lower lip of the front air dam to hopefully pick the front of the car up enough, going up a drive-way to save the air dam. My 308 has the Euro air dam so I might do a similar thing there too because it really gets beat up.

As said before, the wheels do less damage to driveways than metal skid pads and I think they are less stresfull on the car's structure but plastic blocks are an alternative. A lot of modern race cars have skid blocks for when the suspension bottoms out and a lot of them use a material called Jab-rock. It's available in sheets from race car supply houses. It's not cheap but light weight and durable.

Wil de Groot

 

Wil - can you also post a pic. I'd be interested to see.

Thx.

 

I took a few pictures of the skate-board wheels under the nose of the car I'm building. I don't know how clear it will be to you but on this car they are mounted under the front of the support structure for the radiator and front bonnet, one wheel truck behind each corner. The car is all raw metal right now and the lower ducting panel for the radiator is partly obscuring the urethane wheels but hopefully you can figure out what you are looking at. If you're really interested and not too far from Frenchtown NJ you are welcome to come have a closer look.



Wil de Groot
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It's all on his website . http://www.exoticars-usa.com



Anyone who can fab panels on an english wheel is alright with me!

 

Hi,

I actually don't loose any ground clearance. The front subframe that supports the front bonnet, the radiator and the skate wheels sits higher above the ground than the main chassis so that the bottoms of the skate wheels still sit a little higher than the bottom of the car. It can still cange but right now ride hight is 4" and the bottoms of the skate wheels sit at about 4-3/16". The wheel trucks are bolted to brackets that were specially fabricated and TIG welded to the sub-frame.

Yeah, the chassis is mild steel tubing and the body panels are all aluminim. The front valence/air dam is presently made of aluminum but the plan is to make a mold and lay up the final air dam with fiber-glass so that it can just break away if it catches on something instead of passing the damage on back to the rest of the car. I figure I'll just keep an extra air dam hanging on the wall all painted and ready to clip on with quarter-turn fasteners.

If I build an other one I might do it in chrome-molly tubing and carbon fiber panels but since this is the "mule" it's easier to make changes. Nothing works the way you want right out of the box.

The car is sort of buried right now for picture taking, trying to get my 308 done for spring, but there are some older pictures on our website, exoticars-usa.com. Look for "SCRATCH-BUILT CAR".