JMortensen

Yes, it has been done, I think I recall Dan Baldwin doing it by cutting the arm and then adding a piece that plugged into both sides of it and welding it all together. One thing you need to look out for is the tie rod end length. You don't have to extend the arms too far before you start running out of threads there, and solutions to that problem aren't so easy to come by. A couple of us have made our own tie rod ends with actual 5/8" rod ends for the outers. There are a couple of pics here: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=120668

It is NOT needed, and I'm not guessing. I ran that distributor with a 6AL for years with the module then found out you could run without and took it off and continued to run it for years like that, so I've done BOTH. As you can run the wires in the distributor straight to the pigtail that comes out of the MSD for the Ford pickup. Both MSD and the stock ignition module have reps for failure. Running without the module means you can put it in the glove box and then if your MSD ever takes a crap you just hook up the module and keep driving. There isn't any performance difference with one or the other, so you might as well include less potential causes of failure in your system. Make sure you jump the ballast resistor regardless, as that WILL make a difference. Just need a jumper wire that connects one side of the ballast to the other.

Sorry to hear it Dave, but it sounds like you were well prepared. One thing about entrepreneurship, you never have to worry about layoffs. Just starving to death!

I think the advantages of monoballs in camber plates is pretty clear: less side load on strut insert which means less stiction on the strut shaft, easier to adjust camber, less friction in general than the rubber or poly isolators, will lower the car another 1.5" or so without compromising available travel; it's all good stuff. It's even lighter to boot. Sectioning the strut is not required for camber plates. Cutting the stock perches off and welding on a new one is necessary, but that's simple stuff and it sounds like you can cut the perches off and get the new ones situated. Then just take it to any shop with a welder and they could weld the coilover perches on for you.

I like Carroll Smith's books, but people get too hung up on some of his stuff. He said detroit lockers aren't good for road racing, yet they have a LONG history in road racing. He said in Tune to Win that Ackerman is bad, and anti-Ackerman is good. I think he reversed himself on that one later on. And he said that a rear anti-roll bar is bad. I think that is a general statement, not an absolute one, and there are plenty of occasions where a rear anti roll bar is a useful thing. Plenty of formula cars (even modern day F1 cars) still use rear anti-roll bars despite Smith's advice. By the way mass centroid axis is essentially the weight of lateral sections of the car. If you can imagine the car sliced like a loaf of bread laterally, and the center of gravity plotted in each one, the graph you would have plotting those centers of gravity would be the mass centroid axis. I guess it turns from the mass centroid plot to the mass centroid axis when it is simplified and made a straight line from front to back. He shows a diagram on p30 that suggests the RAI should be roughly in line with the mass centroid axis. That model doesn't work so well when translated to a front engine sedan. With his formula car the cg in the front is very low and moves more or less upwards as you travel back until you get to the engine, then goes down towards the back of the car. This is diagrammed on p29 if you're looking at the book. In a Z for example, the CG is higher in the front where the engine is than in the back where the differential is for the simple reason that the engine is a lot taller than the diff. If you were to follow Smith's guidelines and try to match the RAI with the MCA, the front roll center would be a lot higher than the rear. We know that this doesn't work in practice. I'm sure if you could dig him up and ask, he'd probably say that the issue with the Z is that the engine is in the wrong end of the car, and maybe he's right. But assuming you want to work on making a tin top handle, it's probably best not to take everything Smith says literally.

Yeah, that's the way a lot of rednecks lower their Chevy trucks too. Heat the spring until it gives. Very stupid. I wonder if anyone has bothered to tell the guys in the video that they have their springs on upside down...

We had a guy go through the calculations and spring rate from cutting off a couple coils was changed by something like 5%. The stock springs are so soft, that 5% increase is really not enough. You can find spring rate calculations on line if you want to double check my memory on the rate change.

Bad idea. The isolator is there to allow the strut to change angle as the suspension goes through it's travel as well as to reduce NVH. Poly is so stiff that it won't effectively do this. It's kind of akin to using poly TC rod bushings, and similar to the TC rod failures we've seen here, I think John Coffey has posted about seeing strut failures as a result of those insulators. Get some camber plates already.

Isn't it also illegal to run wheels more than 1" wider than stock too, or is that Oz? Regardless, I'm glad we don't have such issues here...

You're missing weight transfer. You can have weight transfer with no roll, and it will still unload the inside tires.

Very cool diagrams. I'll give you my thoughts. Not saying that I know I'm right here, but these are my thoughts on your diagrams. If you read back in previous discussions about roll center, there is a term "jacking" that comes up. If the LCA is not parallel to the ground, there will be jacking. If it is lower on the inboard side, the suspension will jack down under cornering loads. If it is higher on the inboard side, the suspension will jack up under cornering loads. A higher roll center will allow more roll resistance with less spring rate, because the suspension will tend not to compress under cornering loads. A lower roll center requires higher spring rates for the opposite reason. Typically on a lowered Z the front roll center is underground and the rear is about neutral or slightly above ground, which still gives that favorable roll axis inclination. With guys installing 25 and 26 inch diameter tires (read: big rims), they tend to lower the cars more and then the rear is also underground, and I have to question whether there is any roll axis inclination anymore in some of these situations, especially where they move the front LCA pivot up but don't do anything to the rear. This would tend to make the car harder to catch in a slide since it has less yaw damping. Maybe that can be overcome with bigger rear tires. I think it's going to depend on the total setup on each car you look at, but certainly I think we can say having a RAI that is lower at the front than the rear tends to produce a more stable easier to drive car. G Machine adjustable bushings do this for the rear of the Z, but they have a fairly limited range of motion and they are hard to set exactly the same front and rear because the front bushing is larger in diameter. They definitely don't have a large enough range of motion to get the roll center back above ground on some of the really lowered Z's, like Terry Oxendale's car. The front bushing controls the braking load. The rear controls some lateral loading, which I suppose comes at a bit of an angle since it goes through the range of motion available after the front has done it's job. With rubber bushings in there they both probably do some of everything. With monoballs or rod ends on front, I think the rear is more effectively isolated, which means the front does more work in the X plane and the rear does more work in the Y plane. I think you're on the right track here. Not so sure about this. Regardless of which arm type you're looking at, the front bushing handles most of the braking load and the rear handles most of the lateral loading, as in either scenario the front pivot is stouter and the rear is weaker. I guess I'm not seeing how the rear pivot is more stressed in the A arm. I think it is more isolated with monoballs or rod ends in use vs bushings and gets more directional force vectors from the lateral loading, but I don't think it has more loading in the Y axis in either design. Including viperredls1 who broke the AZC H arm, fixed it, and broke it AGAIN with his LS powered autox car on sticky tires.

Roll Axis Inclination: http://www.eng-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=91420&page=9 The effect on TLLTD they're describing can be showing using the Weight Transfer Worksheet that comes up so frequently.

I can tell you that it gets REALLY close on my front tie rods with 5/8" rod ends and spacers, and that's with the strut sectioned, etc. With a non-sectioned strut and no droop limiters I'd bet that it would be a problem. For a race car there would definitely be some workarounds that could make it happen without too much effort, whether it be droop limiters or sectioning the strut a little shorter than it would normally be. With a stock strut I am pretty sure it would be a problem. It would have to be tested to be sure, but that's my SWAG. EDIT--Being able to twist the clevis might be enough to make it work, and might be a reason not to weld the clevis to the strut...

Bad vendor is possible, or Torsen charged more for the R200 because there is no market for the R200. My point was that Torsens in general are cheap. Quaifes seem to be expensive for any application. Price points for Ford Mustang 8.8: Quaife MSRP: $1599.08 Ford Racing Torsen: $573.57 True trac: $453.07

Nothing wrong with cutting springs. Use a die grinder with a cutoff wheel. Cut 1/2 coil off at a time until you get the height you want. I wouldn't use a torch, because it puts a lot more heat in the spring and that could affect the temper of the spring. Cutoff wheel is very localized heat and that's what I would use.

It looks like he has them in about the stock height too in the first picture...

Here's a couple links to that piece under the spindle pin from classiczcars.com. http://www.classiczcars.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=13696 http://www.classiczcars.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=13694 If I were going to do this on a stock strut housing, I'd cut the bottom off the bottom of the housing and weld them longer like Terry did. Much simpler and less expensive.

The problem with the heim joint in this horizontal position is that it can easily bottom. Basically it will restrict the amount of travel available. I like the idea and especially the double shear mount of the rod end (could weld the clevis to the strut housing too, for that matter) but the implementation is a little tricky because of the range of motion with the rod end. A guy on classiczcars.com made one like that and posted pics a couple years ago. I wasn't impressed, not because his machine work was subpar or anything, it just ended up looking like a clumsy solution and extremely expensive to machine all the bits. I think making a cradle for the inboard ends is a good idea, because the rear control arm mounts are pretty horrible from the factory. The uprights with no cross bracing or anything just seems like a really bad design. The one thing is that if you're going to really raise the pivots in front you're probably going to have to cut into the floor for access, there just isn't much room to go up under the stock floor. There is a big plate reinforcing the diff there too. Doesn't make it impossible by any stretch, but it would be a lot harder to do than raising front LCA pivots for example.

http://www.accidentsplanet.com/2009/01/car-crashed-on-church-roof.html

Torsens are cheap! When I worked for Randy's we had a big pile of the 7.625" Torsens and were selling them for ~$175, and nobody would buy them. Regular prices for a Ford 8.8 or similar are about $500. Similarly True-tracs which are another all gear LSD sell for $4-500 for the sizes that are close in comparison to the R200. Quaifes are hyper expensive. Whether you want to say that's because their machining tolerances are tighter or because it says Quaife on it, or because of the warranty, they're very very very very expensive for what they are.

I like this one too: http://www.theonion.com/content/video/experts_agree_giant_razor_clawed

Still, how hard is it REALLY to get this stuff. I could pull out my wallet at a gun shop and have a floated, pillar mounted, glass bedded, match barrel, full on trigger job, R700 in whatever caliber I want for how much do you think? $2500. $3000 maybe. There are plenty of hyper accurate rifles in the hands of civilians in this country. I just don't think that machining tolerances in Iran are so far behind the times that they can't do similar work on a quality bolt action there and essentially come up with something similar. Even it it's not "as good" they should still be able to take out a target at 600 yards. Just to prove my point, I did a quick search and found this: http://www.accuracysystemsinc.com/cust_remington_700.php If I can write a check for this, I just don't think that the Iranian government can't get a hold of similar technology on that side of the world.

Look at my inner monoball mounts. They're welded in. That's one option. It could be done the same way on the outside end of the control arm, it would just require welding the control arm together with a captured monoball sleeve and a separate toe link. You wouldn't need to worry about threads in bending on the toe link, since it only gets acted upon radially. Building the arm this way would eliminate the ability to change the track or camber with the arm itself. Personally, I don't think the threads in bending is a big deal. The only failure I've seen at that part of the control arm was with the AZC chromoly arms and that was probably due to a bad weld more than anything. If someone were inclined to build an arm without threads in bending I don't think it's that hard to figure out how to do it. AZC arm failure: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=123263

The stock control arm has no threads in bending.

That's a good description of bumpsteer. Lots of scrub radius makes a car hard to steer and gives steering wheel kickback, but it doesn't change the direction the car is traveling unless the wheel moves.