Thread: Stress testing my welds

One of the things I'm involved in is the construction of Superkarts which I MIG weld from 30 mm CrMo tubing - a few years ago I posted a thread on this forum about the wisdom of MIG welding CrMo tubing which helped me a lot.

Last weekend we were racing at Phillip Island when there was a fairly major crash after the rolling start. As the footage on You Tube from our on-kart cameras shows the impacts were quite severe, enough to bend chassis tubes 2" out of line, but all the welds held. I'm in kart #65, my camera is in the second part of the clip.

It's probably not the ideal method of testing welds but it seemed to prove the welds were OK.

Phillip Island Superkarts Crash 2012 - YouTube

Rgds - Gavin

What speed would you have been doing at the time of crash?

Looks like that fella who nearly come out in the last bit would've been feeling a bit sore and bruised the next day

DJ

We'd be running at around 160 kph at that stage as we would have been scrubbing off speed through the corner and it was only the 1st lap, a flying lap is faster.

The bloke in #53 is still a bit sore but he did do the rest of the races that day after missing the restart of that race while the medics checked him out. I managed to get back for the restart but I don't remember getting back to the pits so in retrospect I probably should have had the medics look at me as well - but the red mist blocks out such thoughts at the time.

We raced again yesterday but the bloke in #53 did not race (he's 65 so he needed a bit more time to recover) but he'll be back behind the wheel for the next race in a couple of weeks time.

Rgds - Gavin