Tim.Wright wrote:djos wrote:What rubbish, most of the teams have been using laser alignment at the track for years!
All the laser alignment in the world will not detect a chassis defect because the ride height, camber, caster and toe adjustments will hide any problems exactly as they are designed to do.
I´m not a big fan of laser Voodoo .A string will get you there as well .One Thing that will indicate torsional stiffness discrepancies is the cars reaction to crossweight changes .
Sure the Teams know exactly what to expect in Terms of crossweight Change for any Change of push/pullrod length /one sided rideheight Change .If this is not working as expected one has to look deeper in Installation stiffness of that particular car as it stands on the setuppads.
You would ,of course not really know how things behave when the car is running at full temps though ..mind you not only Aluminium and Magnesium but also bonds and resins have temperature related behavior ...once you exceed limits (heat ,Vibration) it may still look fine but lost a fair amount of its specified characteristics .
That said you cannot judge a structure ssolely by ultrasonic testing I´d say .This will only be partly valid if you have done the exact test beforehand so you can relate to a earlier set of data of exactly this structure .But I´m rather sure there are failure modes of a Composite structure not detectable by sonic testing ...
