So for the last few months we've been designing and testing our C7 Transmission brace. We've gone back-and-forth and ended up with a design that fits all the MT models with one kit which is pretty cool. In the process it's brought a lot of good conversations to light. One of those conversations is about wheel hop and it's affect on drivetrain parts. Annnddd in typical engineer fashion we thought about it 20 different ways and ended up with a blog post that I think illustrates the point perfectly.

It'll take forever to upload all of the images so I posted some of it but then I linked to the original blog post. Anyways, here's this. I hope it's enlightening, or at least entertaining!

Torque. The first thing that comes to my mind when I think about torque is trying to break a seized bolt loose. When I was younger my father introduced me to the concept of mechanical advantage. I was a skinny lil’ guy and so out of necessity I got pretty good at exploiting devices of mechanical advantage. Even now I am usually looking for a breaker bar pretty quick. Torque is a rotational force and is defined as the cross product of the force and the distance measured radially from the point of rotation.

Now, as performance enthusiast we usually find ourselves operating our go-karts as close to the ragged edge as we can without breaking. However, the nature of the beast is that we will eventually find ourselves pushing cars backwards at the christmas tree. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility…and hopefully Torque! But did you know Torque isn’t always the whole story? Torque has a cousin called Angular Impulse. Let’s talk about both of them for a little bit.



In classical mechanics Impulse is calculated by integrating applied force over time. Maybe you have heard people talking about “area under the curve”? Impulse is area under the force curve with respect to time. The important thing to realize is that a small force applied over a long duration in time can produce an impulse equal in magnitude to a large force applied over a short duration in time as shown in the figure below. This area is called “impulse”. Impact guns exploit this principle very well by unleashing stored rotational energy over a short period of time to maximize angular impulse.

Let’s think about this in another way. Think about jumping off a 5 foot ladder. When you jump you will accelerate at a constant rate until your feet hit the ground. Naturally (I hope) when your feet hit the ground you will begin to absorb the force of impact by bending your knees.




.... there's a lot more but I'd rather just link to the blog post so I don't have to upload the images one-by-one. Here's the LINK:
http://untecperformance.com/blogs/ne...ngular-impulse