ive never noticed these before until i saw them for myself at donnington and wondered how the **** the cars were floating on air.

i think it was 3 posts built into the car come down thus lifting the car completly off the ground.

can you buy these or is it just a one off thing for motorsport ?

 

Would you actually fit four jacks crucifying your bodyshell and then give up your boot for the compressor and air receiver.....?

 

And totally illegal on any public road.

 

but wayyyyyyyyyyyyy cool ......




have you seen my hover car. . .

 

How is it illegal if you don't mind me asking?

I had a video of a bugeye that had them fittedand it looked very cool indeed!

S!

 

Air jacks

 

K-Sport Ancillaries. Seats, Harnesses and Air Jacks

 

I have Air Jacks on my race car but cannot really see any justification for fitting them to a road car.

A set of air jacks (and you are right it is usually 3, we have two behind each front wheel and one at the rear of the car) costs about £1600 fitted, then you have the cost of the air bottle (we use nitrogen) and regulator to power them. A regulator is another £300+

So firstly I can't see the point of all this expense for the amount of times you want to jack up a road car.

Secondly there is the practicality, the air bottle is a big heavy bit of kit and you wouldn't really want to be driving round with one in the boot, then there is the safety issue of driving around with a bottle of compressed gas in your boot.

For motosrport it is a different issue, pretty much every time the car comes into the pits/paddock the wheels come off it. When the driver comes into the pits complaining the car feels if something is wrong we can quickly get it up on the air jacks to see more easily underneath if anything is visibly wrong or to make a setup adjustment, it also makes a big difference if you have to make a late call to change from slicks to wets or vice versa. The other relevance to motorsport is the difficulty of getting a conventional jack under many competition cars, our car has only 60mm of ground clearance so again trying to get it raised up on conventional jacks is a major pain in the a$$ as I know to our cost when we had an air jack failure.

 

And technically they are Pneumatic jacks, hydraulics would use liquid.

 

they do look cool but wouldnt fit em to a road car . remember race cars are lighter than normal cars

 

Cant find the video i watched a while ago of the air/hydrolic going off on a

road car pulling out of a garage(cctv from garage) pushed the car in to

another car coming into the garage.

Police arrive and arrest the driver for having illegal mod to his car.

Can just imagine it happening while on a motorway/dual carraigeway

 

That was the first thing i thought about when i read the post. "Imagine a failure and it goes off".

Nevermind a hover car, be more like Knight Rider through the air.

 

This wouldn't happen with race air jacks as firstly the gas bottle that powers them is not fitted to the car. (A bit obvious really when you consider the weight of the things.) The fittings and control of race air jacks would in any case also not lend itself to having a bottle permanently fitted.

As I said before, I wouldn't fit them to a car for all sorts of other reasons.

They go up with air\gas pressure and then retract using strong magnets.

What you have seen tipping a car over would not be air jacks, I have had an air jack 'blow' and it didn't even begin to lift a 900kg race car in the air so there isn't a chance a malfunctioning air jack could lift a road car up like that.

 

Wasn't there a very early British car that had these jacks as standard. I'm thinking Armstrong Siddeley or Jupiter Jowett but not sure.

 

hahahaha

just to reiterate i never said i wanted to buy them myself, although they r ferkin cool!

and yeh i thought of them going off whilst driving etc but as someone said the gas to operate them isnt fitted to the car, you connect it ever time you want to use it.

 

It wasn't the Jowett Jupiter although that car did have a number of innovations.

A late 30's Armstrong Sidddely did have hydraulic jacks built in then posrt war to about 54 they had jacks built into the chassis but they were mechanical ratchet operated jacks.