A few questions for the T16 experts out there.

[rob love]

Originally Posted by Andrew Rowe

We also run a M113, which has 64 links on one side and 63 on the other, and this is factory setup. Not entirely sure why they did this, whether it was for road camber? , but it is a bastard driving down our roads and it pulls to the left, but we drive on the left hand side, so is it the camber doing this? if I was in the good old US of A, where they were made , I would be on the other side of the road and it would be driving straight?Cheers Andrew.

It is because the torsion bars are offset from left to right, so it ends up making things a little longer on one side than the other. Note that the final drives and the idlers are lined up.

Mathematically, it shouldn't make very little difference. End of the day, the sprocket teeth are a certain distance from each other, and they drive the track one pad at a time. The amount of stretch on the track is important, and this is where the problems will occur. It is one reason why the proper track tension is so important. There is a certain amount of stretch with rubber bushed track. In the end, the two rubber bushings on that one extra track pad will add very little distance overall.

I recall in my younger days driving the M113A2s from Shilo to Winnipeg and vice versa. They did not drive in a straight line, and one arm got very tired constantly pulling and releasing the one tiller bar. You could not drag on the bar for a long period as it would cause the differential to overheat.