Nohachi's suspension ramblings thread

[roman]

A few random thoughts....

People always want to run short steering arms for maximum lock, BUT shorter arms will give you more bumpsteer.

Running the longest arms possible that give you the required amount of lock will be best for minimising bump steer.

Also there are two distinct types of 80s RWD cars:

narrow body and wide body.

Narrow body cars generally had smaller lighter engines like 4AGE etc, and sometimes no power steer.

Wide body cars like MA61 generally had heavier engines, power steer, etc etc.

The narrow body cars have their struts quite upright, where as wide body ones have the struts tipped further inwards towards the centre of the car.

Doing so raises the roll centre, my theory is to account for the larger mass in the engine bay and higher centre of gravity from the big engines.

More castor is required when tipping the struts over, but because most/all of these cars had power steer, there are no issues with increased steering effort. The narrow body cars keep the struts tipped upright to minimise castor required, which minimises steering effort when the cars do not have power steer. With the lighter mass in the front of the car, the roll centre position does not need to be as high to give the same amount of roll, so this works fine.

Most people put narrow body struts into the widebody cars, to give increased camber.

If you put widebody struts in a narrow body car, you get positive camber.

However!

If you had ajustable top hats, you could use the wide body struts in a narrow body car, tip them over as far as required to get the right amount of camber, and you'll have raised your roll centre compared to using narrow body struts adjusted to the same camber angle.

Any of that make sense to anyone?