Corse I rear suspension failure

[john]

Exactly as I understood the situation.
As I found it the production of the later I chassis left much to be desired and was a stark contrast to S chassis production.
I say this because there was a full set of drawings for the S. Properly drawn with full material specs and every engineering detail. All were notated as drawn by SG.
There was also some continuity in production.
The Alfa I chassis drawings were never complete, sparse in detail and dimensions and most fabrication was done from detail contained in a red hardback notebook at the fabrication shop. This had been passed down from the S chassis fabricator.
Sporadic production cannot have helped either as lack of continuity meant that critical dimensions and details may well have been missed. Development would also suffer, naturally.
Couple all this with a complete disinterest at the fabrication shop who really did have better and profitable things to do, and no wonder that things went wrong.

[GrahamH]

Exactly as I understood the situation. As I found it the production of the later I chassis left much to be desired and was a stark contrast to S chassis production. I say this because there was a full set of drawings for the S. Properly drawn with full material specs and every engineering detail. All were notated as drawn by SG. There was also some continuity in production. The Alfa I chassis drawings were never complete, sparse in detail and dimensions and most fabrication was done from detail contained in a red hardback notebook at the fabrication shop. This had been passed down from the S chassis fabricator. Sporadic production cannot have helped either as lack of continuity meant that critical dimensions and details may well have been missed. Development would also suffer, naturally. Couple all this with a complete disinterest at the fabrication shop who really did have better and profitable things to do, and no wonder that things went wrong.

Bad design in my view , poor understanding of loads and load paths , pretty shocking . Lucky it's easily fixable and hopefully before anyone has a major off.

[john]

Indeed. One of Carroll Smiths mantras was "Never ever put a load into the middle of a tube". And that is pretty much what was done there.

[mariner]

Hi,

Finally got around to hopefully sorting this potential problem on my car.
Made a simple bolt in bracket which runs diagonally from the front wishbone bolt back to the rear chassis.
Fairly straightforward for me having previously modified the rear chassis there was already an attachment point I could use.
When the engine was last out I had replaced the long diagonal tube with two shorter ones to give more room for the exhaust and at the same time fitted a brace across the car between the rear wishbone bolts.

rgds Bob