Infinity IF14 Build set-up and review PT2

In the Previous article I just finished building an Infinity IF14. There will be a couple of follow-up articles of this build.

The first one will be about the setup of the car. Afterwards the car will be tested on various tracks. The first will be a local club race, followed by the EWS on Sweep tires and a couple of tests on the renewed Racing Arena Limburg track in Sittard, The Netherlands. This track has a great and fixed layout and is ideal to compare cars upon.
I will use the following items for the setup and the upcoming races:

• Hobbywing XR10 Pro ESC
• Hobbywing V10 G2 4,5 motor
• Gensace 6000 RS batteries (300grams)
• Sanwa RX482 receiver
• AMB transponder
• Highest DLP650 steering servo
• Sweep 28 or Volante 28 tyres, depending on the race.

The purpose is to use the same items so I can really compare different cars to each other in the future.

As my racing days are far gone, I had to look for a “Stig” to test the cars. Fortunate for me, my 14year old son Florian is a rather good RC car driver, so we got that problem sorted as well!

Introduction

I built the kit more or less according to the manual. I changed some items, based on the Infinity setup sheets that you can find via Petitrc and some knowledge I have from setting the TRF cars up.

The items I use are a glass base plate, Hudy setup station, which include a camber gauge, droop blocs, droop gauge, height gauge, setup wheels and some other items like a tweak rod and turnbuckle wrench. In the past I never took setting up so seriously, but for this tests I will go the extra mile!

Droop

First thing I did was to put the car on the droop blocks and measure the downstop. You can adjust the droop setting by adjusting the downstop screw in the suspension arm.

The IF14 uses small downstop screws that need to be adjusted with a 1,5mm hexdriver. I put the droop at 4,6m in the back and 5,6mm in the front, measured under the lower part of the arm.

Ride height

Afterwards setting the droop I installed the dampers and put wheels on the car. It is also important to put a battery in the car to have the exact weight. I put the car at 5.0mm in the front and 5.2mm in the back.

Camber and toe setting

The camber and toe can be adjusted with the Hudy camber gauge. I put the camber at 2 degrees negative both front and rear. I also checked the rear toe-in to make sure the car was mounted correctly. In order to measure the rear toe-in you need to cut the rear body posts because otherwise they will interfere with the measurement.

When setting the toe, I used +1 degree at the front, and they used -3 degrees at the back.

The steering throw needs to be adjusted with the steering EPA on your transmitter. I set it at 27 degrees left and right.

Tweak

One very important setting is the tweak. Ideally you need to do this after every run, so it’s very important to do it to check if the car is built right. it is If you are not sure how to do it, you can have a look at Martin Hudy Setting Droop on this video by Gareth Coates

While adjusting the tweak, I found that I needed to adjust the dampers screws way too much. I was sure that the damper lengths and the other settings were spot-on, so I rechecked the downstop setting. I found that the front setting was incorrect, mainly because I didn’t take the front bumper off to make this setup and secondarily because the lower arms are rounded off at the extremities. I checked everything again and decided to measure the downstop value under the lowest part of the suspension arm.

The 4.4mm you see in the picture correspond with the 5.6mm value I was looking for initially. I checked the tweak again and now it was spot-on.

Cross weight.

One thing I don’t often do is to check the cross weight of the car. Sky RC makes a handy electronic scale set that allows you to precisely measure the four corners of your car. They use it in full size car racing as well and sometimes spend an entire day to get the balance right.

In order for your measurement to be correct, you need to put the scales on a perfect flat surface. The wheels also need to be perfectly aligned. Ideally you could also use set-up wheels, but I wanted to know the overall weight of the car as well.

I put the car on the scales and, tada…. Everything was spot on. When checking the weight, you need to check the combined front right and rear left weight, as well as the opposite values. You can see from this picture that the car has a 50/50 cross and front-right weight balance. The left hand and right hand weights are also nearly identical.

With the body on the weight was also spot-on. Some people told me I should replace all the higher placed screws with aluminium ones to get the CG lower, so this will be our next purchase!

We will test the car in a local race before putting it to it’s first real test at the EWS race in Essex. You’ll read our endeavours in a next article :)

I’d like to thank Tonisport for sorting me out with the car and parts. www.tonisport.de
Article by David Joos