From the Rolls-Royce experimental archive: a quarter of a million communications from Rolls-Royce, 1906 to 1960's. Documents from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation (SHRMF).
Tyre and springing issues, questioning the fitting of non-adjustable shock absorbers.
| Identifier | ExFiles\Box 19\6\ Scan012 | |
| Date | 11th August 1930 guessed | |
| -3- Any recommendation such as a change of tyres, or the fitting of special tyres, can only be a palliation, even if they overcome the trouble temporarily. The Writer submits that your Design Staff should go to the root of the trouble and invest the combination of castor angle, pivotal angle and general flexibility of the front dumb irons to find the whole root of your trouble. The suggested remedy of fitting special tyres may be all right in certain countries where such and such a tyre is readily available, but I submit that this argument does not apply in a great number of countries where a man has to take whatever tyres his local garage happens to have the Agency for, or a stock of. SPRINGING. As mentioned in the Writer's previous report, the springing of this car seems as nearly ideal as possible up to 45 or 50. on good roads. A point of great interest to me, however, and one which I have just discovered on this car is that the shock-absorbers supplied have no form of adjustment, neither has any allowance been made for adjustment. The question, therefore, naturally arises as to why they should be fitted at all. In the Writers opinion the raison d'etre for a shock-absorbing device is to provide extraneous means of damping or stiffening up the existing springs on a given car when such a car is taken to countries where the road surfaces are worse than those over which the car has been designed to travel in the first place. Stated more clearly, the usual procedure | ||