After watchign my co-driver beat on the MoS yesterday at a site with phenomenal grip, I realized there is way too much pitch, dive and roll.
Car is ~1700lbs sans driver, 94 Swift GT with Koni Sports and soft springs, 22mm rear swaybar and stock 24mm frt. Bridgestone RE-01R's, shaved to 3/32 on 15x7 wheels. -2* camber front, stock in the rear.
Looking for coil over sleeves or stiff, STIFF springs...... anyone have a good connection or maybe parts layin around?
Get a dial caliper and call Ground Control.
Biggest problem is for right now, coilovers are a no-no for me in the rear. I really do not want to mix/match coilovers in the front and spring/seperate strut in the rear.
Always like the GTi's .
There was one around here for sale, and I did my research on what is available for them.
I know that there are a couple of guys here that should be able to help you better than myself, but this was one of the websites that I came across:
http://www.ssgti.net
Good luck,
John
Okay, it pitches, dives and rolls. Does it over or understeer? You need to take stock of any handling woes that need correcting before chasing a body roll issue. If you jack the spring rates etc out of sight to cure a perceived body roll issue you could wind up with an undriveable monster and have no real idea of why.
Jensen.... depends. If the tires are fairly cold it is a mild understeer that can be prodded into a light oversteer. Halfway through a 50-sec course and it tightens up like mad and plows like a farmall. Now I like tractors and all, growing up with them. But I don't want one on the auto-x course.
It's not an excessive amount of anything by typical standards.... but place the car on grippy, glass smooth concrete and it starts to show how soft the springs are. Rears will bottom out. The rear rate (365) looks decieving... it sits inboard on the rear arm giving the arm more mechanical leverage. It's an odd little beast... I can tell you that. THe simplest solution would be slap coilovers on all 4 corners, put it into a prepared class and go to town.... but not yet.
What class are you running? Reason I ask, a quick intermediate fix for what you describe would be to go to wider front tires. That would mean wider rims. That's what the Street Prepared FWD guys have been doing around here and it seems to work quite well. You would have less push since the wider tire would be able to accept more load. This would mean you could rotate the rear more easily. I drove a '91 CRX set up that way and it could be rotated at will.
If you are running Stock class that limits the rim so you might not be able to do that.
If you go this way, be aware that if you change the offset you'll pick up torque steer issues.
About the sleeves etc, I bought some cheapie Ractives off of eBay for my stillborn rotary Opel project. The springs were no names but the sleeves and hats were surprisingly well made. They were for dirt common 2 1/2" springs meaning there's all kinds of springs out there for them.
The Swift uses separate springs on the rear; no reason you can't make adapter cups for the top and bottom mounts to keep a 2 1/2" spring in place, then use shims under the bottom one to add/remove preload and change the ride height. It's crude and not as easy as the coilover sleeves but no reason it couldn't be effective. In fact, the Jensenator has a similar separate spring rear suspension and had those cups when I got it, simple and effective.
Keep in mind that when doing the springs, the wheel rate in the front will be the same as the spring rate (or at least really close) since it's a strut suspension. As you noted, on the rear the linkage ratio of the rear arm will change the wheel rate (the wheel rate will be softer than the actual spring rate).
As far as a recommended rate, the FWD guys on this site will be better with that than me.
ST is the class I've been building for. Chasing down the known entity that is the 89 Civic Si..... not an easy task even if I was building one of the spec cars. Going "outside the box" like I prefer makes it more challenging.
The wheels I've been using are 15x7 +40, they barely clear in the rear with the 195 'Stone. Problem with going wider in the front is A.) only wider tire will be a 205/50 or the 225/45 which affect final drive on a torque challenged car, 2.) will rub at anything close the a full turn and III.) well, cost.
Like most of us, I am monetarily challenged and looks like my orignal plans for Lincoln will end up being put on hold so I can properly develop the car as it should/deserves to be.
Even being a little upset last weekend, I can;t help but smile when you drive this car. People stare. I mean really STARE as it goes rumblin past all stickered up. Most have no clue what they saw. Most can't believe it's actually not the slowest car there. It's just fun.
Looks like you are limited to a 7.5" wide wheel and a 225 tire, according to my 2009 Solo rules. Drat.
Going the other way, you could make it rotate more easily by going wih narrower rear tires or even just jacking up the tire pressures.
Sometimes (and I do not know if the Swift is one of these) you can go with a horkin' huge front sway bar and actually lessen understeer, it works on 1st gen RX7's in conjunction with lots of camber and caster. That works the way you were thinking of, reducing body roll and thus keeping more weight on the inside tires. This was made fun of elsewhere, but you might even try adapting a second front sway bar (run two on the front) and see if that works before spending big $ on a monster front bar just to have it not work.
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