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).
Suggestion for an experiment to mitigate steering wobble by fitting a hydraulic shock absorber to the front axle.
| Identifier | ExFiles\Box 28\4\ Scan125 | |
| Date | 3rd March 1914 guessed | |
| -2- angle of pivot and wheels approximately in balance. Some of these drivers have discovered the wobble gets less the faster theydrive and this may have something to do with the fact that it is nothing uncommon here to see an R.R.car doing 30 m.p.h. over a road that no sane driver in England would take at more than 5.m.p.h. - this of course is asking for trouble. Owing to the great weight of our road wheel and tyres and the very high speed of the wobble all the steering and other parts are subjected to an extremely rapid renewal [handwritten: reversal] of an infinitely greater stress than anything they are called upon to withstand in the ordinary cause of driving and steering. I should like to suggest a possible line of experiment to mitigate or cure this trouble. I think it would be possible to fit, say on the front axle, a hydraulic shock absorber, (something like our old type shock absorbers ) witha double acting piston actuated by, say, the steering arm on the top of the offside pivot. Let there be oil in either side of this piston and a passage through the piston for the oil to travel from one side to the other and of cause arrange for the piston to be halff way along its travel when the car is running straight. Iam of opinion that the size of this passage through the piston could easily be arranged so as to offer considerable resistance to the very rapid movement of the steering due to wobble and yet to offer little or no resistance to the comparatively slow steering movements of the driver. I apologise for going into this matter at some length but I am | ||