00:05I actually spent the best part of 18 years of my career here working almost every day at Lang Lang
00:11and it's been great to be back here with Jack. I'm a vehicle dynamics engineer and I have been
00:15for 28 years now, I guess, which is a really long run. So what I'm trying to achieve with
00:23the Jack Hunter is the integration and balancing of all the different components within the
00:28suspension system that they all work together nicely integrated as a complete system and give
00:34us the best outcome that we can achieve. Having worked predominantly in Australia through most
00:40of my career means that I'm very in touch with what is required on the Australian roads. We do
00:46have a bit of a unique situation where we've got a very large road network supported by a very small
00:51population and our roads tend to degrade a bit here and there and so tuning the suspension is a
00:56little bit extra challenge and managing both the big inputs that our roads have where we've seen
01:03subsiding in the road you know over the years but also the repair work that takes place on top of
01:09the
01:09road surface that puts in the high frequency content. So the specific conditions we're focused on with
01:14the Hunter have been around the payload of the vehicle it's quite a serious ute with around a 900 kilo
01:20payload and we've wanted that to be well managed by the suspension. The way the work normally takes
01:26place is it will evaluate the vehicle on the roads either here within the proving ground or out on
01:31the public roads as well. So this is subjective evaluation and it's critical thinking and it's
01:36just identifying the next obstacle to the performance that we're really trying to achieve with the
01:40vehicle and look at what we could or might change in order to try and improve that particular characteristic.
01:47Most of the work we do is on damper development shock absorbers. Shock absorber it is the most critical
01:53component in the entire suspension system. The shock absorber the damper does so much because it
01:58influences steering response and handling and ride comfort isolation motion control both when the
02:05vehicle is lightly laden or heavily laden. So we've been sent a good library of tuning components from Jack
02:10and these components have helped us try different experiments to see how the car responds to those
02:15different components. Achieving the the best outcome for the damper is it's pretty arduous we really
02:22chop through quite a few different iterations trying to balance out the compression and the rebound force
02:28so that the vehicle has a good balance in motion. Some of these changes we make are seriously minute
02:33you know changing the thickness of a disc by 0.05 millimeters or changing a bleed flow area by 0
02:40.02 square
02:41millimeters. We'll then test that on the dynamometer put it back on the car and then go and drive the
02:46vehicle again. On this vehicle we're now up to 14 different iterations of both the front and the rear
02:53damper so that means we've taken the dampers apart 14 times each front and rear so that's probably around
03:00about 50 damper rebuilds to get us to this you know final stage. The benefits of working here at Lang
03:07Lang
03:07are that there's a really great variety of roads I guess our favorite road is called the ride and
03:12handling road and it's really quite a challenging road there's a lot of vertical inputs a lot of
03:17bumps and yumps to get over and it really challenges the car there's also the circular track which is
03:22great we can run the car out to high speeds and there's a whole lot of other surfaces that we
03:26can
03:26use as well noise and vibration surfaces gravel roads I think there's something like just over 80 kilometers
03:33of different roads here in the breeding ground. So the vehicle dynamics work that we've done here
03:38at Lang Lang is just one tooth in the cog really of the work that Jack are doing to develop
03:42the entire
03:43vehicle. The feedback and the specification we've developed here at Lang Lang becomes part of their
03:49greater integration and you know used by the Jack team to help them understand some of the different
03:54market requirements around the world. I think the level of testing that Jack is undertaking is
03:59testament to their interest in developing a vehicle that is suited to the Australian conditions and
04:04I think that's quite a big commitment. So I think what the hunter owner is going to get out of
04:09this
04:10vehicle is a versatile vehicle that's easy to drive but also something that is suited to the Australian
04:15conditions straight out of the box.
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