Top Dutch Steering Research
- Thomason Zhou
After going through a lot of top dutch content, I tried and make sense of what was going on.
Shown below are some pictures of their all wheel steering (third and final) design, which uses pulleys and wires on the outside of the chassis:
So what is an eierpretzel?
My best guess is that it is named after the shape of the steering wire as seen from the front. Shown below is a drawing of what I mean:
So far, this makes some sense. Based on this assumption(that the design shown above was used), the steering used by Top Dutch would work like this:
The pulley system pulls on one side of the steering system, starting a turn in that direction. However, this means the other wheel has slack and could hypothetically turn freely.
To address this problem, the wheels could be linked together to turn in a similar direction. This means there is probably still a linkage of some sorts that either supports the wire steering that helps take up slack.
This could also mean that the wire only acts as an additional support for the actual steering linkage, which would also make sense.
More pictures but with front wheel steering (second) design:
This design functions the same as the one above but does not have the rear wires added yet.
First design:
This was an earlier design and seems to have been scrapped for unknown reasons