The Slow Lane

Uggg. That what I think when I think about my new suspension setup. It should have been easy. It wasn’t. Nothing has been intuitive. I put the Koni Sport shocks and 400 lb/in spring front & rear on the car over a month ago. And I still don’t feel like it is setup right. I drove around for more than three weeks on the new spring/shock combo w/o an alignment. I didn’t think the alignment would change much since I kept the ride heights about the same. If anything, I thought the front was fine and rear would need some tweaking. Who cares about the rear tires in a FWD car anyways. Boy was I wrong. When I did take it in to get aligned the front tires were toed-in a good 1/8″. I guess thats why it felt like the car wouldn’t turn during the two autocrosses I did on the new setup. Ugggg…

Let’s get back to that ride height thing. It was a PITA to set the ride heights on this new setup. Popular internet wisdom says to put the Konis on the lowest spring perch so your springs don’t rub the ground control sleeves as much. OK. When I lowered the car the front was dumped and the rear was monster truck high. I tired playing around with different perch settings in the rear but nothing made any difference. It wasn’t until I asked on RR-AX.com that it was pointed out that using a higher perch would only make the car higher. Ride height is a function of shock body length, spring length, spring rate, and vehicle weight. My other big concern with the rears is that when I finially got the ride height were I wanted it, with the rear suspension at full droop the spring was off the perch by an inch or two. I don’t like this situation. Guess some tender springs would be in order. That is more money.

In the fronts, since the ride height was dumped w/ the spring just touching the perch @ full droop I had to raise the perches a lot to get the ride height up to an acceptable level. This meant they got very hard to turn. Too hard by hand. Ground Control doesn’t give you a spanner for the perch so I had to improvise. I got my oil filter plyers and used them to grip the perch and spin them. They kept slipping and now the anodizing is all scratched up. Uggg…. I finially ordered the real deal.

Now we get to the most recent part. I took the car to a very repuatble shop to have the car corner balanced, aligned, and to have my new front camber kits installed. The camber kits is the reason I waited so long to get this work done. Didn’t want to pay for the alignment twice. So I dropped it off for the day so I wouldn’t have to take any days off from work and Irene drove me to work. They ended up working on it the ENTIRE day…. and charging me for all that shop time. They spent three hours fooling with the corner weighting. The fronts were nornal but the rear weights were way off. The left rear was way heavy. I got the car corner balanced last year and it was not like that. So they ended up dumping the LF to 4.625″ ride height (from 5.375) to try and get a good balance. It is still only 50.8% now. I should be able to get 50.5% or better. I don’t like the ride height being that low, especially in the front where the steering happens and the shock travel is the least and all the weight is. And they charged me an arm and a leg for it. Opinions after the fact all say that they should have disconnected the rear sway bar as that is likely causing the large L-R weight imbalance. I want to take it back but will only do so if it’s for free. I’ve paid them enough. I want to use the excuse that the front is bottoming out. I think it may be but it’d hard to confirm. I do see and small mark that looks like the camber kit stud hitting the shock tower metal. Otherwise it’s hard to tell. Uggg…

All of the posts older than this came from my old “blog” which was nothing more than a static html page I would update, less often then I hsould have. By installing software to make it easier to post I hope to be posting more often. And since it is so easy to post I hope to be posting on more than just car stuff. I guess I should introduce myself to anyone happening to catch this an a feed.

I am a twenty something, going on 30, guy, a mechanical engineer. I graduated college late so I am a little behind in what I feel my professional develoment should be (read I should be more in charge and making more money :laugh:). As a mechanical engineer I have kept in touch with my inner geek. I almost went the computer science route after great success in a community college C programming class. But my love of cars and machinery won out.

My affinity for code landed my in geeky jobs once I transfered to university and started doing co-ops. My first co-op was a what was essentially a Center of Excellence for Computer Aided Design & Analysis tools for a very large engineering company. Besides the work with the CAD tools (I worked with primarily Pro/Engineer) they did a good deal of web publishing. Sharing best practices and lessons learned between all of the different divisions and sites thoughout the county (many of which were bought out or merged from different companies) was the name of the game. Oh, and most of the CAD tools were on a Unix environment. So there I learned how to use the Unix shells, and started programming in Perl to make some active pages for the website.

My next job landed me at a powerplant. The plant had a system which archived every datapoint from every sensor in the plant in a sophisticated data server. Another ASP based software was purchased to mine out this data and present it ina pretty way to users on the utility intraweb. My job was to help define the software’s pages and common data sets, which could be made to look like a plant operators screen or can do post analysis on data, such as calcuating heat rate, heat transfer rates on certain peices of equipment, or track effiency of the gas turbine compressor. So needless to say I learned ASP and how most database driven web apps work.

Now, in my job i use quite a bit of CAD software. Our company’s choice is with the Autodesk products. Actually were are a traditionally heavy AutoCAD company as most of the CAD users so pipe layouts and structural drawings that are suited to 2D. As part of the product design group (and not doing that type of work) I pushed for us to aquire a 3D software package. Autodesk’s Inventor was choosen by management. I have grown to like it and consider myself an intermediate user who is starting to dabble in advanced areas. In my private life I have become involved in a motorsport called autocross. It is a totally amatuer, entry level sport where you take a regular production automobile, with varying levels of modifications, and run them though a small course made with traffic cones in a large parking lot. It is quite fun and challenging. And the people you meet are get. I’ve made quite a few friends doing it. So I got invloved in a geek role with my local autocrossing club and am the admin of their discussion board, which is a phpBB board.

So that’s it in a nutshell. And I’m just about spent so until next time…