Hello people,

I’m still building my Mk Indy, the suspension is all rose-jointed, and as I progress with the build, it dawns on me that when it comes to finally ‘adjusting’ the chassis geometry you effectively have to dismantle most connecting parts.


Description

Has anyone come up with any safe workable solutions to adjusting the geometry without taking it all apart? And without substantially changing the track width of the car. I was thinking an additional threaded sleeve is the only sensible option (means re-drilling/tapping etc).

Like this:




Thoughts?

[Edited on 4/12/12 by Twin40]

There were some issues with those type adjusters AshG had a failure but the ones he'd used were made of ally not steel.

I think it works ok if they are steel.
Hopefully AshG will be along to explain more

You're not really going to do it without modifying your wishbones or making new. It isn't too much of a hassle to take it apart for the number of times you're likely to do it. The fact that you have rod ends rather than taper ball joints should make it significantly less hassle.

I looked into doing it last winter and came to the conclusion that it was extra complexity, extra failure points and extra weight for no real gain.

Thats my 2p!

I'm just thinking along the lines of ease of maintenance trackside. If we can change the geo without having to strip the suspension down everytime it will save time and hassle. Maybe i'm wrong?

to make it all adjustable without taking it all apart, you need to start with something like this


can't quite get my head round the best design for the bottom ones, but you'd have to have a threaded tube in it so that you twist one way, it gets longer, the other way goes shorter.
if you have the right spacers for the rose joints though, its easy enough to jack the car up, remove a bolt from the shock, remove the bolt from the rod end to be adjusted, and put it all back together in my experience. not a hugely quick job, but it won't take all day, 15mins maybe

Yep to make it easily adjustable, you will need to have a new set of wishbones made. We went to extra hassle on the delta to make it fully adjustable, made setting it up and corner weighting a 30minute job rather than majority of a day with your car.

We are doing same again on our new seven however downside is you do add weight.

Left and right hand threaded rose joints at each end of the wishbone arms with a flat ground into the top and bottom of the arm.
Loosen the lock nuts at both rose joints and rotate the wishbone to lengthen or shorten the wishbone.
Look at the suspension on most formula cars or purpose built race cars.
The way your suspension is done it is more time consuming to adjust, but once the innitial setup is found not much tinkering is needed.
The only big swings are for heavy rain races.

Thanks for the reply chaps, some useful stuff there. I will probably leave alone for now, and get a 'basic' setup first. Learn to drive the damn thing and then go from there.

Thanks again

Clive