So near and yet so far

Well, and it was all going so swimmingly. So much so that I finished off putting the roundel on the front.

After that it was really only arranging to point the wheels in the right direction.  In order to do that I installed fake Tim, a collection of bags of sand, in the driver’s seat and set about starting the setup, which was going to take rather a while on this completely unaligned chassis.

As you can see, this Tim doesn’t need a steering wheel. On which subject, I did discover fairly quickly is that I don’t think I’ll  have to modify the rack extensions, as the car’s got about 25mm of toe-in at the moment. Odd that it’s fairly easy to push around.

Then I set up setting the ride height. I set the front which was pretty easy and then went to the back. The car was a long way up in the air and I had to keep winding the spring platforms down. When it was done there was an alarming amount of free air betwixt spring and spring seat with the car on full droop. When I put it on the ground it seemed horrifically stiff, until I realised that it was sitting on the bump stops. Ah, that’s not good.

So I measured the bump and droop settings and discovered that the rear suspension doesn’t have anything like enough bump travel in it at the moment. And far too much droop. So much so that I need to raise either buy some different dampers, which I’m not about to do, or move the upper spring mountings, which I guess I’ll have to.

What’s more, I went and checked the front suspension too and that was suffering from much this same thing. This is a real bummer because I measured the front suspension carefully ages ago and decided that I needed to modify it to increase the droop travel. Seems I was wrong. I have no idea why but the chassis measurements don’t lie.

So, I un-modified the front suspension the other day. It’s almost too far the other way now, to be honest, and I’ll have to put a fair bit of pre-load into the springs to get the static ride height correct. However, it should be OK.

Now I’m going to have to modify the rear suspension in order to shift the upper mountings up by a soupçon. Oh well, yet more powder coating bites the dust. What’s more, as a consequence of this adjustment, I’m not sure whether the other mods I did ages ago to arrange for the driveshafts to not hit the chassis are going to work. More thought needed.

Ho hum. That all meant that my original thoughts about going testing at the end of this week have come to a grinding halt. Luckily there’s still plenty of time.