Sure it could be done, bring money.

One thing about trailer tires, inflation pressure needs to set by the
load. They are small and they spin fast and they are poorly made and they
love to blow out. Squishy trailer tires are guaranteed failures, even
small ones.

Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Vanagon Mailing List [mailto:vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com] On Behalf Of
Mike Elliott
Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2008 12:06 AM
To: vanagon@GERRY.VANAGON.COM
Subject: [NVC] Engineers: quick and cheerful vibration analysis?

This is a question for the engineering geeks here.

Say you were towing a little trailer behind your Vanagon. Say that the
trailer had a rudimentary suspension consisting only of leaf springs. Say
that this trailer also had tires, the pressure of which could be adjusted:
higher pressure results in a harsher ride, while lower pressure results in
a softer ride. Say you wanted to determine the optimum pressure of ride vs
tire squishiness but were unable to find a small boy to ride in that
trailer to report back about smoothness of ride v tire pressure while the
experiments were being conducted, so lacking that small boy, your thoughts
naturally turn to instrumentation. Okay, so say you had a laptop computer
(WinXP) which could ride in the passenger seat, and /three/ business days
in which to acquire the needed sensor (accelerometer?) as well as the
software to display the ride bounciness.

Could it be done?

--
Mike "Rocket J Squirrel" Elliott