How do I place my suspension for a rear swing arm setup?

N₂Onsense

N₂Onsense

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Hello,
First of all, I am new here but have found all of your helpful recommendations and tips to be very useful, which is why I am posting this here:

I have looked about the forum for a specific way or some sort of formula for mounting a swing arm suspension setup in the most effective way possible, but haven't found exactly what I am looking for.

I came to ask if anyone knows the best/most effective way to mount (12") basic shocks for a rear swing arm pivot suspension setup. geometrically I assume its a perpendicular tangent to the center of the radius between the two parts I'm connecting, but even then I'm not totally sure.

I just created this incredibly inaccurate rough sketch to try to convey what I'm trying to get at, which may be nothing.

In my mind I think it will look something like this but have seen many different variations so I may be completely wrong.

1772689419220.png

This is my first time working on any project like this so any recommendations would be really helpful (For the record I am 14 and have no idea what I am doing lol) Thanks all!
 
ezcome-ezgo

ezcome-ezgo

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Welcome and thank you for the MS Paint, my personal favorite. I would suggest you actually make multiple mounting points, both upper and lower if you have room. This is the essence of DIY, Seat-of-the-pants engineering. You could just drill holes in some angle iron, mount them on the swing arm and "backrest frame", and move the shock/spring around and see what works best for you. Forget all about the perpendicular and tangent nonsense. You don't have time for that.
 
Hellion

Hellion

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He's right. Fabricate some shock location options because different angles affect the shock action. Just gives you more options if you have a bracket with 6 holes in it for example.

I've even got R/C cars with multi-hole brackets for the shocks. No telling which location is the best, it's trial and error...
 
P

panchothedog

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I have several karts with swing arm rear suspension. With all of them the shocks are straight up and down. I don't know if that's correct. But the engineers that drew up the plans ( all are different makes ) thought it was. None are home built.
 
Master Hack

Master Hack

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Maybe this will help?
www.krazedbuilds.com

Shocks and what are we doing with them? - Krazed Builds

Shocks and what are we doing with them to tune? Its one of the (we think) over looked areas for many. For most its a simple question of what springs do I want and what oil are people using. Like many things in tuning this is something that may not work the same for everyone. […]
www.krazedbuilds.com www.krazedbuilds.com
 
Hellion

Hellion

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Master Hack said:
Maybe this will help?
www.krazedbuilds.com

Shocks and what are we doing with them? - Krazed Builds

Shocks and what are we doing with them to tune? Its one of the (we think) over looked areas for many. For most its a simple question of what springs do I want and what oil are people using. Like many things in tuning this is something that may not work the same for everyone. […]
www.krazedbuilds.com www.krazedbuilds.com
Click to expand...

Can't get much more authoritative than that, plus it reinforces much of what we can plainly observe. The real trick is possessing the attention span to read it! 😄

Aside from all that, the angle of the shock can supply some desired effects, depending on what you are after.
 
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