Riley actually doesn’t really do Internet much. I think he even spent most of 2020 without a TV in his apartment. He’s either Working, or he’s outside on a bike/board, Or he’s in the shop making something with his Welder or Sewing Machine.
So all the stuff he sees from the forums and stuff I usually have to show him. I hadn’t seen the Parall yet though.
But we are both aware the family of trucks that have a bushing seat for both pivots, instead of a bushing seat and a pivot cup. I’ve not come up with a good name, they don’t need to have parallel kingpins. The first ones I saw were TKP inspired and had two kingpins at two angles.
Though I guess if you were to think about it more like schematic language, they’re acting in parallel rather than being necessarily physically arranged in parallel, I guess that name actually works rather well.
Does that mean we can call Double kingpin trucks Series Kingpin Trucks?
Can we get some series parallel kinpin trucks going?
Anyway, Riley’s question was really about doing away with the spherical bearing ( even though he said bushing ). He’s asking about that because bushings are cheaper and easier to get for skaters, and it would offer a more comfortable ride. And also to ask what intrinsically is different about the joint you get from the spherical that you don’t get from bushings.
In this case, you could totally just replace the spherical bearing with a bushing seat. But of course the spherical provides total support for the riders weight, and with that bushing orientation it would be rather difficult for the bushings to do that. Rider weight would sideload the bushings, and you’d have to have a really restrictive seat to keep the bushings from just sliding out.
You could also flip the bushing seat orientation, and instead of a the spherical coming out of the baseplate you just have a normal kinpin sticking out. You stack on a bushing, you stack on the hanger/bushing seat, and you stack on a bottom bushing. It would look way more like a traditional truck, and now the weight of the rider pushes the bushing into the seat rather than sliding it out.But the wacky thing is the pivot angle and the kingpin angle would be out of alignment, which is something TKP trucks do, But what would make it really wacky is as you adjust the pivot angle of the trucks through moving the two linkages, it wouldn’t change the kingpin angle. The higher angle you put in, the less bushing engagement there would be. Kinda fun idea, but I think mostly makes the truck less versatile.
For the raising COG, we’re just saying “What mechanism could you stick in there so that as you turn the COG of the deck gets higher?”, in a very open ended way. And yeah you could do that with a sensor and a gearbox. But the way we’ve always approached a raising COG is by increasing the distance between the hanger and the baseplate.
Part of the question is, if you made it so that the axle moved up and down somehow and wasn’t constrained in the main spherical, does that stop the other two linkages from working?
If you were to free the axle I don’t think it could move up and down in a straight line, it would have to move perpendicular to the pivot angle, and it would have to travel in a circle around the point where the two linkages join on the Baseplate.
It’s a pretty unwieldy question, but it does lead to some pretty interesting exploration.