CORNERWEIGHTING

Nitron has the very latest Dual Load-Cell racing cornerweights and is able to carry out a set-up on your car to suit your driving requirements.

WHAT IS CORNERWEIGHTING?

When a car is sitting on it's wheels, it is balanced in equilibrium on four springs.  Standard shocks have non adjustable spring platforms so manufacturers have worked out what length and size of spring will allow the car to sit evenly loaded on the ground.  When you fit shocks with adjustable spring platforms, you can only guess at the correct position of these platforms based on the ride height.  The car may in fact not be supported evenly on all four wheels.

THEORY

A front engined car like a Caterham will weigh more at the front, and a rear engined car like a Porsche will weigh more at the back (no occupants in these cases).  So when these cars are weighed looking at their individual wheel weights on cornerweight scales, they will have a front to rear weight bias and a percentage that we can calculate.  But if someone gets in the drivers seat on the Caterham, one side will weigh more too, so the picture starts to get a little more complicated.  We can see all this live on the cornerweight scales digital read-out.

It is possible too that the car may have it's spring platforms set up so that the car is rocking on a diagonal, i.e. the front left and the rear right tyres may be carrying all the weight of the car, and very little pressure is being exerted on the front right and the rear left tyres.  We can make this happen by winding the spring platforms towards the springs on the corners where we want to increase pressure, and away from the springs on the corners where we want to reduce the pressure.  Eventually, we could have the springs on one diagonal fully compressed, and the springs on the other diagonal actually slack, at ride height.  This would be an extreme case of the opposite of what we are trying to achieve.

We may have to accept that our car will always be heavier at one end, and if it is set up for one driver, always heavier on one side.  These are physical factors that cannot be corrected by correctly setting the cornerweights.  But, it is possible to achieve a balance where the car is evenly loaded across the diagonals.  This will be an optimum set-up, and in essence it means the front right added to the rear left will weigh the same as the front left added to the rear right.

HOW WE CORNERWEIGHT

Nitron has a system we have developed ourselves in-house.  We lift the car onto 4 special tables that are 1m above the ground.  These tables are already accurately levelled to each other and incorporate the load-cells with free-floating turn-plates on top.  The turn-plates allow the car to settle on it's suspension without any side loads from the tyres.  As the car is 1m above the ground, we are able to access the spring platforms easily from under the car and we can monitor the pressure changes as we adjust the spring platforms.

PRICES

Nitron charge £225 plus VAT for a cornerweight only, or £150 plus VAT when combined with a full wheel alignment.