Keep on tracking

As discussed in the previous post in this apparently never-ending lurch through a tale of cock-ups and curiosities I had to modify the front suspension. So, I cut off the little “ears” that I’d welded onto the front spring mountings an eon or two ago.

This was actually spectacularly difficult to do and I only managed it with the aid of a cutting disc in a Dremel and going very slowly. You can just about see in the photo where they were.

In fact, one of the issues about the car is that access around the front suspension, steering rack, etc., is horribly difficult. It doesn’t look that bad when you just look at it but as soon as you try and get any sort of tool in there then it bashes into something. After I finished cutting off these bits of steel and painting over the wounds I refitted the suspension. In order to adjust the ride height I had to cut about 1″ from the end of my C-spanner’s handle so as to be  able to get it onto the spring platforms.

Still that was eventually done and I set the front ride height at an RGB-acceptable position.

Then it was on to the rear suspension. As discussed here I had to shift the top spring mounts up by about 25mm. I ended up with the upper mount looking like the photo here. This is essentially a standard suspension U-bracket mounted on a raised platform made with the aid of a bit of chassis tubing and some 3mm plate.

Oh, and I’ve put the spring back. I also painted it, as you can see.

However, this all revealed a potentially serious problem in that the suspension won’t quite articulate to the top of its travel (to be honest a bit that would involve mashing the bump stop into non-existence) with the driveshaft running out of plunge travel. That is, I think (I’m not too sure about this yet) that I could really do with the driveshafts being a teeny bit shorter. I think this is a consequence of the J15/Spectre/Riot rear suspension being a bit odd in that Jeremy designed it, I assume, to clear a potentially relatively large car engine being in the engine bay. This isn’t an issue for me, of course, and one of the things on the “wouldn’t it be nice” list is a re-engineered rear suspension system with longer wishbones and completely different mountings.

In the meantime, I shall have to have a careful look at how the suspension moves. I can’t admit to being too enamoured of buying more driveshafts at the moment…

So, completely ignoring that I set about starting the setup. However, having done the front tracking and camber I struck a problem in that I don’t have a suitable socket for doing up the rear hub nuts. Well, that’s not true, I do but for some mysterious reason it’s a 3/4″ drive socket and I have absolutely nothing that will fit this. I could make something with much faffing about on the lathe but I decided to come and update this ‘ere blog instead. See, you’re top of my thoughts all the time.