The oddly named 843 Future Car was released in 1997. While clearly intended to be a dune buggy, the unusual styling may be a hint at the reason behind the name. This model has huge tires and features steering, suspension, a removable engine, and opening doors and hatch. It has large sweeping curves made from blue flex hoses. Unlike many sets of the era, it is not scaled for Technic figures and does not use the standard monolithic seats but instead builds up very nicely sculpted seats with bricks. It also has a very unusual flex system based steering.
This set is very durable and quite fun to play with. With 4 shock absorbers and a rear swing axle it can take a lot of abuse, and of course it is a source of rare blue parts.
The front wheels can be steered using a "hand of god"wheel at the top of the vehicle. The wheel drives through a set of bevel gears. While most vehicles have rack and pinion steering, this model uses an engine crank pin to translate a small flex axle back and forth. The flex axle acts as a tie rod. The rarely used steering hubs and ball joints support the wheels.
The driver's steering wheel is geared into the system and is therefore functional.
The doors use the simplest mechanism possible, pivoting around connectors on the body flex tubes.
The model has a rear mounted V-4 engine with transparent cylinders. The entire engine can be easily removed by simply raising the rear hatch and pulling it out. The hatch locks the engine in place when down. The ease of engine maintenance would be useful on the way to Dakar.
Since the engine sits above the suspension but is connected the rear wheels, the drive system must pass across the suspension axis. Driving an axle also used for suspension is a problem because of the weight on the axle, and this model solves that problem by using clutch gears which can slip on their axles. Consequently, it works very smoothly.
A differential completes the gear train. The ratio between the wheels and the engine is 3:1.
The rear axle is "live" and uses a differential gear which incorporates a built in 16 and 24 tooth ring gear. The differential is made to house 3 of the 12 tooth bevel gears. One is on each axle, and one planet gear in the middle allows the axles to turn at different rates.
This model uses the smaller 16 tooth ring gear of the diff, one of the only models to make use of it.
The rear trailing axle has a large travel using angled shock absorbers. Since the front has no suspension, the pitch angle of the car changes considerably with suspension compression.
This set uses 4 of the large 68.8 x 40 balloon tires and wheels.
By Technicopedia