I am looking for ideas how to mount the weight up there without welding on a tab? THe floorboard is too flimsy and not sure its even legal to mount lead to it.
Any examples of how people have mounted weight here?
You’re 100% right on that for a Euro chassis. It’s hard to screw up the weights on those if you place the seat right and pile the lead on the seat.
Bolt it to the tab on the right of the photo where the front bumper mounts to. You’ll have to drill the hole out to M8 to be legal in most series. It’s further to the side from your CG so you may be able to get away with a smaller weight than that one.
Filling it with anythign solid would effect its function (stiffness, flex, torsion, etc). Filling it with lead shot or something similar is against most (maybe all?) organizations safety regulations.
Just for my own curiosity and education, would it not be better to mount that weight in the center on the steering column bracket, like TJ said, to keep your front percentage, then jump on the chassis to tweak the cross back in line?
If you go the bracket or tab route, that seems like a pretty “active” part of the chassis to mess with how it could flex in any way, especially asymetrically. To kinda put this in perspective, how tight that bumper bolt is right above where you show your weight going can change how the kart handles. I’m not good enough yet to really feel those type of things, but I have been told it really matters by people that know way more than I.
You would use the inherent slop in the rear cassettes before you start jumping on the chassis.
You can normally grab a percent or more cross just by loosening the cassette bolts and letting the chassis settle or smacking the cassette downward lightly with a mallet.
Most people aren’t going to feel or notice .5-1% on cross and you can adjust around it if it’s slightly off by fine tuning elsewhere. OP would be better served just sticking it where TJ says and not putting as much emphasis on a perfect scale. At track setup adjustments are going to change it anyway.
Yeah I wouldn’t be jumping on my chassis to try and bend it into submission to get my cross % correct. You can probably move a.weight somewhere else and get the cross to be right if you center mount the front weight.
But also I would like to note that I haven’t checked cross weight on a kart in probably over 5 years. Getting it within a couple % is probably going to be close enough that you won’t really notice the difference.
When you want to get real precise with your cross, you will grind out the notches between your ride height holes to give you infinite adjustability on cross. TJ is definitely the expert here, but when it comes to low HP stuff, cross is one of my tuning tools. I start every single weekend on the scales to get my baseline perfect and then adjust over the course of the weekend. I use this on every chassis I own now:
It’s hard to screw up the weights on those if you place the seat right and pile the lead on the seat.
