Quote:
Originally Posted by owly
I don't have any references.......... I built quite a few of the reverse truck loaders back in the 80's. At first they were a handful to drive....... worse if you didn't reverse the axle.
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Howard, I hate to be a party pooper, but...
RWS had been around 100+ years, and there's precious few that were safe road vehicles - the vast majority are low speed material handling forklift types.
The problem cannot be corrected with steering mods. When you design with the CoM forward of the steer wheel(s), but behind the front axle, you cause the CoM to move laterally outside the centerline turn radius during turns. When that happens, the angular velocity of the rear wheels increases, causing significant side loading on the rear tire's contact patch(es). Steering becomes unpredictable because of the high lateral loading of the rear (steer) tire's contact patch(es) during turns. Adding positive OR negative caster to the steer wheel(s) may improve steering 'feel', but does nothing to eliminate the core problem, in fact, altering the steering geometry creates a dangerous false sense of security at higher speeds when the rear steer tire grip is eventually lost due to increased lateral contact patch loading during turns.
