Quote:
Originally Posted by judgie
going to be reworking the suspension on the 03 race ready for a proper attack on the hill climbs next year.
want to move awau from the anti roll bar doing the work of locating the tca. Also means i have quick eseay adjustment of castor and anti roll bar.
what i cant decide on is weather to go for a compresion strut or tension strut.
think with the heavy braking, hard cornering i would be better with a compresion strut but a tension strut would be eseay to mount.
I see the j-sports track car has a tension strut with seperate anti roll bar but thats a track car on nice smooth tarmac.
Allready running rose joints on the inner tca mount so the struts will be rose jointed through out.
Also want to make up new steering arms that have rose joints insted of ball joints, makes setting the ride hoight and bump steer very eseay then as you can space the outter ends up tih spacers to get the steering arms leval with the floor at ride hieght.
on the rear i want to get away from as many bushes as poss with out going to a uniball rear end, imho the rear suspension works very well with the torsion bars giving a nice rising rate but the rubber bushes allow to much flex with wide sticky rubber.
also want a adjustable rear anti roll bar which i thik will run over the top of the gearbox.
have thought about moving the rear shocks to on top of the trailering arm to give me a bit more ground clearnace over kerbs, have cought them before!
so any ideas or have i missed anything ?
cheers rob
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Hi Rob,
I have avocated a compression strut for the caster and TCA location for some time. My arguement is:
1) The AR bar set in bushes gives fixed caster and too much flex under braking and severe bump loads.
2) The anti-dive and pitch is limited when it is controlled at the front by the AR bar or tension strut.
3) The front of the frame head although stiff is not as stiff as the tunnel around the Nap hat.
4) With a vertically adjustable inner link on the Nap hat tunnel the anti-dive can be quite significant and it puts all the inner links up and out of the way of potential damage.
Rose joints throughout are a must to maximise control. You won't be worried about road vibrations into the frame will you?
Be careful about spacing the steering trackrod rose joints up too far as you start to put a bending moment into the fixing bolt. Also, you will need rose joints with a large tilting (setting) angle to cope with the large variations to be encountered.
Wally has I believe recently used a Porsche rear TB housing bearing that reduces the permissible flex to stiffen the rear.
The rear AR bar I have is only slightly adjustable with a rising rate (for the same reasons as the TB rate) and that is located under the gearbox. Where would you fix the AR bar if it were over the gearbox as there is no chassis?
The top fixing for the relocated dampers has the same problem as the AR bar insofar as there is little chassis to fix to. Unless you use the same mount and shorten the dampers. What about locating the bottom mount behind the axle to increase the stroke and thus slow the required response time? I have always found that the high frequency damper response falls off much quicker that the slow frequency response.
Just an tanner's worth
Clive