Quest - Frontwheel suspension

Suspension in your Velomobile gives better road contact and makes a smoother ride, but will interact with wheel alignment and track width. These effects increase rolling resistance and tyre wear. With careful design of the Quest and Strada we could avoid these undesired effects almost completely as you see in animation A. In animation B, C and D you can see the effects when positions and slopes of rods and joints are not carefully chosen.


The Quest/Strada suspension legs are mounted with less width on top as on the bottom. This would decrease track width under load, but this is compensated by the guiding rods that are mounted with down slope in neutral position. If the suspension travels the rods move to horizontal and gain effective length.	Here (img. B) you see the length and position of the suspension guiding rods is not optimally designed. There is a considerable change in track width while the suspension is working.

wrong suspension

Length and position of the steering rods have to be chosen carefully. In this animation (img. C) you can see the effect on the wheel alignment if the ball joints are not correctly positioned.

If the ball joints are correctly positioned the wheels will stay parallel when the suspension works. Here you see (img. D) the wheels go from toe out when the suspension goes in, to toe in when the suspension goes out.