1959 Kurtis Kraft Kart

[Tom Smith]

Go Power ran one with a Koing twin.

kurtis konig.jpeg

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Here's a story about Kurtis and his karts Bob Airheart told me.
The big Kurtis Indy cars used Airheart brakes, well one day Airheart was visiting Kurtis and saw one of the karts.
He couldn't believe the Rube Goldberg disc brake set up Kurtis had come up with for the kart and was convinced he could make a much more practical disc brake for them based on his self adjusting race car brakes. Long story short, Airheart made their first hydraulic kart brake and Kurtis was the first customer.
This one in the image still has the Kurtis mechanical disc brake.
The torsion bars and friction shocks are something of a carry over from the Kurtis midgets.
I'd set it up so there isn't any weight jacked. The circle burners jack weight because they only turn left. A utterly unscientific method to check the corner weight is place pieces of paper under the tires and pull on them to see if they are equally loaded. That also works for checking the corner weights on a tweaked and re-straightened standard kart frame. On the other end of the spectrum are digital set up scales.

[steve miller]

hey everyone .. couple quarter midget Co. tried to build karts ..offeyette,s were -built by larc-Dougles Co., vally stream n.y. i have offey 1/4 midgets .. only seen pictures of there karts never seen one in real life .. http://i756.photobucket.com/albums/xx21 ... 0_0430.jpg

[Andy Symons]

Well the early Percival didn't rely on any suspension adjustments like the Kurtis but it was a heavy bugger. Very interesting story about Airheart and the brakes - looking at them certainly leaves you wondering and lots have commented on the inadvisability of having them work against the sprockets. But in all the testing done by the Kart Mags back then, they couldn't say enough about how well they worked on the Percival with no fade. I believe it was KW which actually disconnected the one and still had a good brake.

Now as the owner of a Percival I still have a bone to pick with these odd brakes since there seem to be none around anymore. Interesting too that Engels/Borelli saw fit to use a very similar style but only one pad per side.

[Scott Grundfor]

Tom,

Thanks, great photo of the Konig Kurtis. Do you have any other shots? How did the kart perform? Must have a ton of power but handling?

My Kurtis has torsion bars and friction shocks front and rear. I assume you set the torsion bars to provide equal distribution of weight on all 4 corners. How do you set the shocks. Would you set the bars with or with out driver. Also, what about ride height?

[Tom Smith]

Most likely the torsion bars and shocks are already set unless somebody has monkeyed with them. I'd borrow a set of scales and establish what the current settings are on a perfectly flat and level surface with the driver who is going to drive the kart onboard before you adjust anything.

[Dominic Salvato]

Scott, I wouldn't mess with it other than to clean it up. It is a surviving piece of history of the sport we love. The sound and the sight of it is priceless, as is.