Thread: Dislocate or Retain?

Originally Posted by lambrover

the only way a retained coil can flex as much as phil's is by actually being much higher in it's free length to start with.

My mate has a Patrol and it has a 7 inch spring lift 2inch body 35 inch tyres adjustable ever thing the point is my 2inch lifted county with my custom shock mounts I am able to flex up the same as he can, my shock thengths are the same as a his, my rear shock travel is 12.8 inch.

When we where parked next to each other we noticed that chassis and sill where very close to the same height despite the differance of 4 inch in spring height. His coils are retained and can be as they have a free lenght that is compatable with the shock open lenght. So it stand to reason that if you haven't got a huge spring lift but want travel then you need to run longer shocks and relocation cones.

Not really, that is only one of the ways you could setup in that situation. There is pulling on the spring as posted above, there is also the X-eng setup too.

first off the patrol front and rear link set up/geometry doesnt allow for as much flex as a rover, no matter how good the springs and shocks. Their RA have much larger bush seperation at the axle and are shorter overall lenght, the rear is a parrallel 4 link plus panhard that will never flex as good as the rover A frame.

put longer springs and shocks on the stock def, tuned to work with each other and it will perform better than the stock set up...and no you dont need 5 feet of lift to get good wheel travel retained....

the stock springs in the rear of a def are about 350lbs, the shocks have bugger all travel, the fronts are progressive rate, which after about 6 months generally have the top 3 coils bound and not working to much....its not hard to improve on this with good spings and shocks and 2 inch lift....

Serg

edit: spring rates for 110 trayback....i would imagine fronts same for 90/110 but rears differ, shocks would be the same

Serg, our vintage Deafeners are 330lb rear, 225lb front for the 110, wagon or ute/trayback.
130 uses the same but has the extra 140lb inner spring on the rear.
With this setup there is about 1" or less droop before the shocks top out when unladen in a 130.
Just swapping to longer stroke shocks you can instantly feel the extra body roll on the rear with the extra droop

I will try it I will retain mine and take photos of how far the coil will stretch this weekend

just threw some measurements into a 4 link calculator....with a guess on COG being about 700mm above ground.....running 33 inch tyres and my set up (aprrox 2.5 inch lift) it gives me AS of 133% at normal ride height and a axle roll axis of 13 degrees roll oversteer ....

at 8 inches of down travel AS has risen to 226%

Serg

Where you getting 8 inch down travel. If you have 8 inch strock shocks it would be more like 5 inch down and 2 inch up and 1 inch is used up in safety for bumb stop.

Originally Posted by lambrover

Where you getting 8 inch down travel. If you have 8 inch strock shocks it would be more like 5 inch down and 2 inch up and 1 inch is used up in safety for bumb stop.

i have 12 inch shocks, but was doing it to show how much the AS rises on a 2.5 inch lift truck, now if your getting even more down travel/droop with unretained springs and long shocks you get an idea

Originally Posted by uninformed

just threw some measurements into a 4 link calculator....with a guess on COG being about 700mm above ground.....running 33 inch tyres and my set up (aprrox 2.5 inch lift) it gives me AS of 133% at normal ride height and a axle roll axis of 13 degrees roll oversteer ....

at 8 inches of down travel AS has risen to 226%

Serg

Rough rule of thumb when changing geometry, you only get roughly half the effect of whatever you are after by altering the height of a link at the axle end rather than the chassis, but sometimes it's easier at the axle

What program are you running Serg ?

I've never really plotted out a live axle, only ever done wishbones and I used to do that at half scale on a huge sheet of cardboard with string.
Still have the big piece here somewhere with camber curves and R/C's plotted all over it

I have a good program in DOS here somewhere but i was never clever enough to work out how to run it