Here's the link to a short vid from the Blue Balls 2010 session in Raglan. Cheers.

nice. looks like the boys had some fun.

Al got a bit of axle tramp going on with that ski set up!.....

nice vid

al seemed to be trying the limits of everything !! axle, lines, kites

well done Dave..

Love the look on Craig’s face when he nearly looses it on Charlie’s buggy.

Al… like the new bug… but what’s with the flappy bit underneath for? Not surprised you are breaking lines either hooning around like that!

wow.its looks good n sunny even. i know it wasnt

it was an epic session, love the vid dave.
flappy thing guster, was the batterd remains of my mudguard...god rest its soul.
the axle tramp hopefully wont happen in the moose, it only started during pretty hard drifts that you dont normaly get to do in the soft sand, also had the tyres pumped up very hard, i think if they were to be softer it will help kill the tramp, failing that im not sure what to do.
testing went well jimmy nothing on the buggy broke atall...very happy with it.cant wait to get it in the moose.

guster, are you able to cast some harder urethane pucks? the ones in their at the mo are overly soft for the rig...i also wonderd about inserting a wedge shaped shim both bottom and top to offset the link so it preeloads the durometer to compensate for sag?...hat do you guys think about this??

We should have sorted you out with the rubber mudflap!

I have some new casting medium in different flavours. Flounder belly yellow flava to be exact. Unfortunately they like things dry and warm and I don't have the postcure environment if I have neither of the aforementioned right now(stupid winter) But I am working on it.

I would not go harder either as you get less damp and more rebound. Instead we should look at larger diameter rubbers for you. Either that or a lighter buggy!

Waiting on delivery of a press ram to make some cupped stainless washers to help support the elastomers better and hopefully prevent the splitting and tearing. Slowly getting there...

nah use some harder urethane! say 85a duro! then you can sell me a smidgen so i can re-urethane my trucks! because its all about me!

i say flag the cupped washers. from my skateboarding back ground they always caused more tearing/splitting than flat washers.

At least you didn't quote me on the larger diameter rubber part! I have to make a revo style truck before the Moose too... perhaps we can sort something out before then.

Definitely larger washers each end. Mixed reports about cupped washers though. Good excuse to expedite my press anyway!

preload to get a flat swing arm comes from the fork angle or head angle, wedges is damage control. gotta see your setup to work out if its head angle or fork angle you need to tweak . def not too much harder on the duro i have been there and its the crappiest solution, very harsh and almost no dampening. softer is better but less controlled, medium is good remember we have tried 7 different mounts now so its getting harder to improve on what we have. you basically have axle tramp Al , it will be worse with soft tyres, the force of the wheel bolt is not actin on the center of the axle in a slide and its winding up the axle, thats why an axle that is wide and thin works better in part. petes foil axle is still the best one of them all to date, i haven't found one better so far. Eugenes is probably the next best and is a good solution to build yourself. As solid axle has been argued by the maker of the xx racer as the only good solution for pure racing, and his buggies are usually up in the top 5 so i would tend to agree for now . i love how smooth perrin looks through the corners in that video, well done once a gain ave it looks good

Looks like you boys had a great time!!!
I didn't make it there and I'm not going to make it to the Moose either
The upside is......I'm of to Abu Dhabi for a year so I can play in the Dunes
I have been in contact with Sand Yeti and should have a buggy sorted for when I get there.
Its going to be great not having to worry about the wind direction and whether the Tide is in or out!!!

lets face it ski axle is just a quick, cheap, easy trial. It will have issues as we can see of axle tramp plus torsional lateral and radial flex. gannets carbon yacht mast axle is pretty damn high tech and out of reach by mere mortals.

gusters wood axle is ok but i think a composite leafed shape would yeald a better result. think of a super long snowboard shape with a good 100mm of radius over the length of the axle.

get the shape right and it will flex to flat for standard riding give a nice supple amount of negative travel and have a fairly high rising rate for harder hits. laying up some solid layers of double bias on the 45's would give you great torsional rigidity


thats my 2 cents as a non buggier.

" the force of the wheel bolt is not acting on the center of the axle in a slide and its winding up the axle"

it just one of those jobs I didn't get back too,
and make new end plates to hold the wheel bolt on the centre line,

but the ski axle comes into it's own when you hit the dunes, it,s better than sliced bread and my carbon axle

Taking one step back , I think the buggy was designed and build for the dunes , not the hard sand.
so, get the buggy off the beach.

buggys are like cars there is No perfect car or buggy, Buses, sport cars, 4x4's they all do one or two things well and that's all,
as we will see this year, speed buggys will be developed into something different again.

You cannot have any negative camber in the axle when it is unweighted or unloaded. Else on the upstroke with the kite or in really bouncy situations you alternate positive to negative camber... really bad thing at high speed!

Secondly, similar to the durometer issue you don't want to store energy, you just want to absorb it, damping oscillation and bounce out of the wheels in order to keep them in contact with the ground... breaking contact prevents you from loading up the kite and transferring the force into forward speed and motion. So a really good single fibre laminate is kinda out as it stores energy well and releases it which generates rebound. If you use double bias or triax you would have to lay it up so non of the fibres run lengthwise and due to it's nature the long fibres will still create a very stiff and lively laminate. Hence why I opted for chopstrand... not because I'm poor or because it is all I had to use but by design as it creates a dead laminate that dampens rather than rebounds.

This woodcore axle was my first and I was surprised how well it worked. Having the stub on centre prevents tramping and the wider profile prevents alternating toe-in toe-out, I would like it a little stiffer for my weight by adding core thickness but afraid it may make it too lively. A few options to test anyway...

Gannet wrote:


Same with kitesurf boards and mountainboards. Good excuse to have a good vehicle dedicated to a purpose...or if you interpret that the other way round, a vehicle for each purpose. Good excuse for lots of toys if any!

yea, im not worried about the tramp in the moose, even my libre tramps when you push it out hard enuff.
and i compleatly understand the buggy isnt designed for hard sand racing or drifting..
i shouldnt really have been taking it as sideways as that but was just getting a feel for it...reality is thatyou only go that sideways when your coming to a stop...the only thing that would realy require it to be changed/fixed would be if i start racing that buggy and it starts tramping on a hard overpowerd sliding tack..and i may well start racing it because A its perfectly ballanced, better that my libre witch is always rear heavy...
B it can hold more power than i could possibly imagine
(this exites me)
C its like my other lounge chair
and last but not least, it will scare the hell outa plummet and oh how thats gonna be a laugh

in responce to your head/fork angle jimmy, i would only want to adjust the angles to alter the handling , rather than to overcome suspention sag issue,in order to get the swing arm level you would be adjusting geometry throught 20degrees or so.. on a mountain bike you would ,in this situation, wind in some preload....you wouldnt actualy alter the bike to compensate for the sag..i definently wouldt chose harder springs for any other reason than to ballance my weight, and it appears in this situation i am to heavy for the spring, but i dont want to change the spring feel, i really do love how plush it is but the fact remains that when im in the buggy iv used up all the travel...i like the idea of a diamiter increase...
the other thing i tried and it works, was a negative spring (very large elastic band)... with some pretention in the band i could agjust the sag to normal amounts (1/3rd) whilst still having a lovley soft and active suspention fork....but it was ugly as hell and probably required the bestpart of 15 kilos of backpressure to get the fork feeling right

i agree that wedges are damage limitation.as is the elastic band theory...but i think preload is the way to go somehow(not rider/buggy weight) but a spring on the fork to take the load and let the urethane do the damping..
the downder is who wants a dirty spring on their fork not me...they say the uglier the machine the grater the love affair but springs on my nice fork.....please, id rather take up blowcarting. wotwot..

but it would work and thats important.

Takes alot to scare the hell out of me Al but do your best! hehehe.

i'm hunkering for some landkiting but conditions here are more conducive to the water at the mo.....

The whole design of the elastomer has to be balanced as it’s both a factor of volume and surface under compression as well as the durometer. Since responsiveness has to be balanced to the hysteresis of the system, durometer plays a very important role. This is a factor of the system inertia, applied force and distance that the system is being acted through. Hence why I think there should be a subtle difference between the elastomers for a bigfoot compared to a barrow racer if not only for the fact that the swing arm ends up longer.

I placed a bevel on the elastomer to match the look of the original ones but I think the best design is to have the washer that supports the outer faces fully support the whole outer surface and bevel the washer for looks instead. This immediately increases the supported volume. If you currently have too small a washer it may be an easy test to slip in a larger one and see how much it improves the performance.

While my barrow racer is superb I have a similar issue with my Moosetruck due to the weight of the downtube and front fork construction. I wanted extra weight in the front since I extended the length and needed to balance the design. However the elastomers are not designed for this weight so I also want to go larger in increments to see what it affects. Though it takes me a good day to machine a new set of molds to achieve this.

So what is coming:
New casting compounds.
Elastomers without bevelled edges so the washer will support the surface right to the edge.
New larger molds in 55mm or 60mm to test
Maybe try a cup washer as I see as much support for as against giving me an indication that issues are design specific.

Hopefully I have time left to get the oppertunity to kite too.

my experience with springs and elastomers. .. . . . skateboarding and mounatin biking, on my revo style trucks. is that you are far better off with the corrent spring weight/durometer and running no or very little preload to achieve the desired result.

from what you explain (without riding it) i still recon for the heavier buggy your'll need heavier duro.

northernal321 wrote:




As far as i know your fork is made from my drawing plus peters usual tweeks (he even tweeks my ones) my drawing has some basic dimensions of the goose neck in order to make it work properly and the design is set to the MIDDLE hole of the three in the front of the swing arm to get the award winning trail (note: almost every sports bike has the same trail in the world now for the same diameter wheels as we run). you can adjust it to preference though. The elastic you mention is actually the very way the Original leading link is still set up on speedway bikes , google leading link and speedway to get some ideas. they use more rubber bands to make the suspension harder and i guess different duros. Im not as up with the play as most of you on setting up suspension ironically BUT i got the geomety right and did practical experiments to find the best dampening i could. im just trying to work out how yours is that far out Al and why, i have seen the problem before but only on elastomers that are too soft, or not enough preload back bend of the forks. i am doubting the forks are a mm out so im thinking goose or elastomers currently and that your running the front hole on the swing arm, or have altered the hole spacing as the hole spacing matches my set geometry and hardness of the mount. we have 15 or 20 working world wide now so its just a tweek at this point

Hi all, I have uploaded what little video footage from the First day of Blue Balls at Kawhia. Not much buggying but plenty of Rain. Shame Thomas and I had to head back to Wellington and miss day 2 at Raglans. Not a great video session as the camera kept shutting done in the rain

Here's the link

(gotta love the thumbs up from Perrin going down the hill)

yikes. looks abit bleak......
i suppose thats kiting for you. if you have one good day in an event you should be happy!.

Hey Al, looking through the vid and your swingarm on the leading link appears to be traveling steady and horisontally! Unless I'm missing something they seem to be good unless you're riding with other rubbers.

rubbers are the same as the ones you made, there the natural rubber looking ones...
the way i see it the link has roughly 2inch travel in either direction, 4inch in total up and down...the buggy takes up one and i take up the other leaving only very stiff and unusable travle at the very end of the stroke..
the way i set up a bike fork is when i weight up the bike i use up roughly a third of its travel as sag, at the moment the buggy uses up a half of the travel all by its self, this means the link needs some preload to compensate both the weight of the buggy AND my own body weight to make the most of the travel.
at the moment even if the urethane was stiffer it still wouldnt have any preload, you would still have the spring loaded in the wrong direction with all your mass, so to compensate for this it needs some spring...
whats happend is that i decided to make the trail on the fork the same as my rigid forks at about 110mm from the centerline, this is a bit longer than usual llforks so the effect of unwanted sag is more pronounced.

plummet wrote:


We had 2 good days. One was just wet.

northernal321 wrote:


Looking at this you have the minimum trail and the largest load thru leverage on the elastomers. This and the result of a heavier buggy makes a big difference.


You usually move the axle back in relation to the fork axis to increase trail.
Rake and trail
This would in effect reduce the leverage on the elastomers.

Otherwise if you want to run the trail you have now with the axle on the forward end hole of the swingarm why not chop and change the forks to bring the pivot point forward and reduce the amount of leverage on the elastomers. This is what I'm doing with the moosetruck to bring it closer to the operating range of the elastomer(that and making the elastomers slightly larger)

PS. Think I'll need the larger elastomers for running a 17" bike wheel anyway.

dont think moving the axle back is a remedy, it just means my fork has a setting that isnt tuned.
also i wanted the axle to be where it is for handling reasons, id like to reduce the headangle but thats about if for fork tuning, the handling is based on my v-max angles with the bigfoots on..thats where all the measurments for the forks came from an im gonna stick with it because its soooo sweet..
im gonna go with my spring theory, i dont want to make anything firmer or stiffer, the fork is so supple that to change this would be sacralige...
i think i might have to make some airo blades for the fork legs, that way i can hide the springs

i have been catching up on the discussion.. whew .. I just realized something. Its really cool to watch the leading link concept evolve and be customized by others too. Ill look forward to riding your mk9 version of the leading link Al . I wish plummet would make a buggy, i know it would be cool he just needs to grow up /older first hehe. Gene , i have had very poor results from the bigfoot leading link on the bike rims so far , it wasnt made for the job.. sure but im going to have to work out something new to handle the super hard tyres, now they are down from 42! psi it should be a bit better haha.

just noticed something cool about the xx apex racer that is going into my next buggy, ironically it was anyway but i have just realized its already there on the apex i just started my evolution a few years later