Quote:
Originally Posted by 7thgear
those bellville stacks are interesting, never seen them on a car before. Idea seems solid, why no mass production?
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I think the biggest issue would be weight. With steel, at least, a belleville washer stack would be considerably heavier than a conventional coil spring in anything other than a very short travel application. In the case of the Dallara F3 monoshock suspensions they probably only had ~0.5" or less of travel in either direction. Even then, a coil spring would have been lighter, but we're talking on the order of 0.25 to 0.5 lbs difference overall which would be offset by the ease and absurdly low cost of changing spring rates.
Even with composites, a coil spring would probably be lighter. I'd like to see how Hypercoils' carbonfiber belleville washers stack up (get it?) against Audi's fiberglass coil springs.
