Beckley Design Company

A customer imported a Mitsubishi Minivan Kei truck, and wanted to run some Honda wheels. No troubles, we can whip up whatever custom adapters you need! All made in house, in Canada, with quality hardware and materials. Get exactly what you need!

Burnout isn't just what you do to melt tires. It is also what you get when you work too hard and too long. I suffered some major burnout after putting myself through several 100-hour weeks earlier this year. Between the day job and the build, I didn't stop or slow down. It was a year of relentless building to get to this point.

I haven't touched the car in four months. It was still sitting on the ground from the last show.

Until tonight.

I'm back. The build is on its stand. You're not going to want to miss this.

This rear suspension has been through dozens of concepts and designs in the method of mounting the coil overs. There is no perfect solution, so now is a good time for a freeze on the design concept, allowing only minor adjustments as necessary. This will move the vehicle further into manufacturing and get the car rolling. Several factors played together to arrive on this design, including manufacturing capabilities, packaging, aerodynamics, mass distribution, stiffness, performance, load paths, and aesthetics.

There are a few important benefits of this design. The dampers, and springs, will be mounted outside of the bodywork, which will make for a visually interesting backend, with very easy and quick suspension tuning. Additionally, this design keeps the dampers close to the centreline, and relatively low, which will aid in keeping the rotational inertia and centre of gravity low. The load paths are very close to planar. Much of the manufacturing can be done on a CNC, and there are only three unique parts, which makes it more accurate, and reduces the labour time. The packaging is quite nice, with the dampers so close, an antiroll bar can be accommodated very easily with little additional weight. This is a reasonable balance of the several design criteria established previously.

One challenge with this design is by far the torsional rigidity of the frame at the rear bell crank mounting plate. However, by adding additional mounts between the frame and the transaxle, we will utilize material that already has to be there, for increased rigidity. The other issue is the slight angle with which the pushrods actuate the bell crank. This angle will create a moment on the bell crank, but with sufficient design work can be accommodated. The downsides to the design are far outweighed by the positive aspects and can all be designed away.

Work is progressing on the upright mounted steering arm/push rod mount. It is critically important to understand that by moving the mounting of the pushrod onto the upright, you must maintain the point of action on the pivot axis, or the kingpin axis as some call it. This actuation point location, when not constrained to act on the a-arm, can actually be tuned to very great effect, but without careful consideration it can very easily be a negative one.

We are getting into relatively complex suspension kinematics here, but if you have the upright mounted action point offset from the pivot axis, you will cause two major things to happen.

1. Due to the inclination of the axis with caster and KPI, you will cause the vertical height of the pushrod action point to move up and down relative to the wheel upright origin as the upright is turned. This means due to geometry alone you will be lifting and dropping the wheel in considerably through a turn. Effectively what this means is additional weight transfer and roll. This can be managed, and even tuned to the benefit of lap time, however this is well beyond the scope of this project. With careful design work, this type of mounting has the ability to add height to the outside corner and remove height from the inside corner. You're geometrically counteracting the roll on the vehicle and keeping the aerodynamics flat, without adding stiffness to the springs or further coupling the corners with increased arb stiffness! Further investigation required!

2. You will be adding a steering torque. Considering *all* of the corner force is reacted in the push rod, your steering torque will be substantial with any measurable action point offset from the pivot. Depending where you place this push rod action point, you can reduce or increase the steering effort.

Starting another project, this one is just for personal gratification. It will race in 24 hours of LeMons.

1989 Volvo 240, with a 2.3L I4 5 Speed manual, De Dion rear axle, and McPherson front.

The laundry list to get it race ready is relatively short, add a cage, fire suppression, race seat, and harness. The list to get it reliable a little bit longer, shifter linkage, clutch, brakes, suspension pivots all around, and tires. The list to get it to dream spec is probably billet uprights with dual a-arm front, big brake kit, and pushrod suspension all around for better ride frequency.

Mid week render. Today we are working on bellcranks. One of the major benefits of pushrod or pullrod suspension systems is their tunability, past the conversion of sprung mass into unsprung mass. Bellcranks enable a designer to balance damper velocities and spring rates with required wheel rates very efficiently by providing an easy place to modify motion ratios without upsetting other aspect of the design, which are frequently constrained with packaging.

An often under looked aspect of these suspension types is in how the bellcrank and associated mounting can actually contribute to the spring rate of the vehicle, making it softer sprung than expected, if based purely on the installed springs and motion ratios. If the bellcrank mounts aren't well supported, such as mounted in single shear, or in the middle of a tube member, you will see a lot of extra deflection. On top of that, the bellcrank itself will deflect if not up to the job.

In the case of this specific design, extra webbing is anticipated to reduce the relevant movement of the pushrod and spring holes. This is one area of a vehicle worthy of careful attention to detail and stiffness optimization, at the expense of weight.

Mid-week render time! A-arm parts are all designed and into manufacturing! The heaviest a-arm is about 757g; we will end up around 4.5kg TOTAL (10lbf) for all the a-arms on the car! That's a respectable number.

We definitely have some testing to do on the novel any-angle swivel joint, I would like to perform some destructive testing on some test specimens before putting them on the road. If they work they will make rapid setup changes extremely easy, with caster, camber, and KPI all changeable independently or together. This means you could set the car up for lightweight steering in autocross, and then add some steering weight for a road course run.

Sometimes you need to do things even if they don't make sense. Designing bespoke brake calipers is definitely a bit of a challenge. Luckily there are a lot of resources available to figure these things out, learning from the mistakes of others compiled into a book. Between research papers, SAE publications, and FEA simulation we made it happen.

Real world testing will be done in conjunction with backup off the shelf calipers. This is one of the reasons I designed my uprights to accept calipers on either side.

In the end, this takes a lot more time than simply purchasing brakes, but costs no more money, and renders a lot more knowledge gained. Intimate knowledge on the construction of these types of components, which are generally taken for granted, allows more efficient problem solving, and improvements.

Would you design and machine your own uprights if it took multiple full time weeks?

Ever wanted a two seater race car that fits anywhere? How about this FSAE style two seater powered by a 1.8Turbo inline 4. Side by side comparison with an FSAE car shows just how small it it.

The great Colin Chapman once said "Adding power makes you faster on the straights; subtracting weight makes you faster everywhere." Here we have an off the shelf wheel hub that will be modified to remove weight where it isn't needed. From 1874 grams (4.13lb) to 1503 grams (3.31lb) thats a 20% reduction in mass. For all four corners thats 1484 grams (3.27lb). All for maybe 15 minutes of design, 20 minutes of CAM work, and a few hours of machine time.

For the uninitiated, that may seem insubstantial, but if you can reduce mass of every part you put on the car compared to the basic form required, you end up with substantial benefits.

This is what we do at Beckley Design. We obsess over the details. Give us a DM if you need us to obsess over the details and squeeze some more performance out of your project.

Here is where BDC MK1. Chassis lays a few days before I send it out for coping. 45kg of steel, 117 tubes, and a lot of compromises!

Brake Calipers are done! Performed some FEA on them, they alone are strong enough to stop my 1000kg car at 1G on a single corner, at temp, with a reasonable FOS on top. Order some material on Monday and start production!

Shoot us a DM to get your projects engineered and manufactured.

Scheduling around full time work, things are a little more drawn out that I'd like, but keeping a schedule means that bit by bit, a racecar will be built.

Another preliminary design update. Rims, Brake Rotors, Brake Calipers, Uprights, Hub, Bearing, Suspension mounts, A-arms, all 30-80% figured. All the components are conceptualized individually, then brought together into an assembly and continuously refined for part and assembly performance. This means fitment, serviceability, weight, strength, etc. is improved on all parts simultaneously. This circular design iteration brings the quality of all parts up as opposed to optimizing one part at the expense ofothers.

Preliminary conceptual design of some four pot front brake calipers! Long way to go yet!

Another day, another part designed. Building a car out of nothing is a daunting task, but as the great Johnny Cash said, one piece at a time.

Most of the time the parts you design for a large assembly like a racecar, are only vaguely similar to the final iteration. In this case, the seat will almost definitely change. The shape will be improved after building full size mockups, accomodation for a harness will need to be added, mounting method will need to be determined within the chassis, and driver comfort will need to be more thoroughly investigated. 20% of the solution is worth 100% more than nothing.

Keep building!

Always working on something interesting, but not usually something that I deem worthy of sharing. I've decided to instead share my journey here. Open wheel 2 seater mid engine rear wheel drive road car optimized for the backroad twisties. I'll share more details on the design process in time.

Flashback to when i was racing with this team. We needed to rig up a mechanical throttle body in place of our drive by wire the day before we left for competition. Only thing we could do in that timeframe was grab something from the junkyard and make this adapter out of a billet of aluminum with a hole saw and an angle grinder. Obviously this was before I had a CNC mill at my disposal.

New old tool day! Retired engineer/machinist allowed me to seperate from him some tools of the trade! Half of what he had, so another trip is in order to get the real good stuff.

Tooling up! Going to have to take that silly swivel base off the vise, but cheapest entry into a reasonably sized vise. Will probably only use it for some roughing/first op stuff anyway.

Bentley here, I have a degree in engineering, but my real education was designing and building race cars with and today we have the opportunity to support the continued excellence of this student run team. Search for UBCO Giving Day online, and send a few bucks their way. This is where engineers are made, not in the classroom.

Hey, hope your Tuesday is going well. Just a reminder to get out there and explore. You can find gems like this.

Check out our website for adventure gear that makes getting out easy as 123. Link in Bio.

I think this is what you call making your own CNC stand and enclosure.
Speaking of saving money, to celebrate the new CNC, I've discounted everything in the BDC store 10% off for the next week. Link in Bio Get out and l

Let the journey begin. Today marks the start of the of BDC.

Thanks for letting me borrow the lift truck.

#770 #440 #1100

As always, another Saturday, another new sight. The lake is over 100km long, you can go somewhere every weekend and never see the same view twice. Lots of new product ideas, now the arduous process of making them a reality!

Let's face it... That Canadian Tire tent is not meant for venturing into the mountains. I've made that mistake, which is why Beckley Design is now offering a real adventure tent! Take advantage of you own backyard, spend the night in the woods, then do it again next weekend.

Check it out at beckleydesign.ca

Design has been locked in. Manufacturing drawings have been made. It's time to manufacture!

This will be a multi-use tool, whether using the knife as a wedge to split a log, or using it as chisel to build a guitar, this thing will be reliably sharp for generations.

Excited to announce a new collaboration with ! BDC will be providing design services, including 3D and 2D modelling, in addition to organizing and communicating with manufacturers to make sure we only release the highest quality parts! Napkin sketch to reality. Stay tuned for more updates, should be good fun.

As a young company, now is the time to nail down our processes and document control procedures. BDC has developed numerous process manuals, including our engineering quality process manual. Inspired by ISO9001, we take continued quality very seriously. Honestly, this is the stuff that we get out of bed for!

@ Beckley Design Company