Steering Setup

On the FF buggy, chassis space is a premium as the rear trailing arms are so long and the chassis is much shorter. Within that space I had to fit an ESC, battery pack, servo, receiver AND the steering mechanism.

On the few FF buggies that inspired this build the steering was a direct setup with the servo horn connected straight to the steering knuckles. This setup results in significant bump-steer and I wanted to use a bellcrank mechanism instead.

The challenge is that the typical bellcrank system requires quite a bit of space. To get around this I decided to try something different.

Instead of the pivot point being in the middle of a bellcrank, I moved the pivot point right up front and this allows it to actually sit on the sides of the front gearbox, close to the outdrives. To achieve this, the bellcranks actually mount to the upper deck instead of the lower one. The bellcranks now pivot forward instead of backwards in a typical setup.

This took a long time to figure out how to get everything working freely but it's working!


Here's a picture from the underside of the upper deck.




Space is a premium - that's all the space there is between the servo and the front gearbox.