Seat struts

B

btjones65

Member
So....
I broke seat strut on my kart running down in Barnesville. I borrowed an old fashioned clamp on strut to get through the weekend. When I got back. I sat down with a friend and came up with a seat strut I thought would work machined out of billet aluminum. The first version was beefer that it had to be but... I didn’t want it to fail at the Brickyard.
it worked really well. Held solid as a rock. Didn’t bend, move, slide.
bolted it on, and it was solid as a rock.

So, here’s the questions.
What is this science behind seat struts?
Why are they designed the way they are?
Is there some amount of flex inherent in a strut that helps the chassis flex?

I kinda like what I’ve made it really works well but...It’s racing. pretty much everything has been tried twice and failed three times. So, I’m just trying to f
 
cost too manufacture is one . light , strong and easily adjusted .
stiff will transfer more .
there must be a reason the sprung seat strut was made illegal .
 
Cost to manufacture is not as bad as I imagined it’d be.
what has really intrigued me is the clamping setup. I think anyone that’s used a bolt on strut would agree that they don’t hold up well and flex way too much.

the base on this one bolts on horizontally and is very slightly out of round which (Found this quite accidentally) grips the cross bar very well, doesn’t shift or slide, and disperses the load into the base rather than the bolts of the base. I do have concerns about it not flexing enough but...What is flexing enough or too much?

It’s also very possible to mix materials in development so that it would be partly, aluminum, partly steel tubing. The tubing can be threaded so that if it breaks, it’s a simple operation to unbolt and bolt on a new one. The initial cost would be higher but, the cost of use, adjustability, and ease or repair would be much better.
 
With my Sprint kart, I had a brace on both sides going from near the top of the side of seat down to the rear bolt on the bering hanger. Both sides. Everybody was doing it (1969) so why not. The anal retentive's had 2 maybe 3 on each side.

Kerman kart track has a banked turn, left hand, (Much like a turn on On an oval track with banked turns) atcoming onto the straightaway. About two thirds the way through it, all the sudden, it's amazing how much my kart went squirley. Really bad. I immediately went into the pits. You guessed it, the right side seat strut had broken. It's amazing how much better they handle with the seat struts.
 
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Make sense to me.
I am a big guy. I’ve lost count of the number of seat struts I’ve broken over the years. This is the first on my MGM but, if it’s made correctly, damn thing shouldn’t break at all.
 
I broke a couple on my MGM sprint too. Anyway anytime you put a different seat strut you should feel a difference in the setup and handling, the same way you do when you add or remove struts or place them in a different area of the seat/frame since the are transferring your weight. That's why they break.
 
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