quote Originally posted by perkidelic: I thought Howard was talking about getting the pivot points on the same horizontal plane - like what you are going to do with the wedges on the front suspension (?). I'm gonna have to print this thread to go with the "Mid-engine Drag Racing 101" and "Porsche-ish Potential" collection perk

Uhh...
Well... I'm sure you've noticed that the '88's have the good stuff from the factory, but the early cars are the ones with all the upgrades available because there are so many more of them. For instance, you can swap A-body hub carriers, and soon W-body hub carriers, into an early Fiero, and have bigger stronger bearings and other bolt circles available. Can't do this on an '88, even though the '88 has fundamentaly better suspension geometry. Developing hub carriers for the '88's, and control arms to use these hub carriers on early cars would allow us to develop a unified parts swapping scheme to put all Fieros on equal footing in terms of eventual capabilities and available upgrades.

Putting '88 hub carriers on an early car shouldn't be hard at all. Held claims to be able to supply widetrack suspension arms. Just find out how much the upper ball joint moves out with the '88 relative to the early spindle and order an upper control arm with that extra length. Do the same with the lower ball joint and the RCC lower control arms. Use '88 tie rods instead of early tie rods, and everything will be cool.

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'87 Fiero GT: Northstar, Getrag, TGP wheels, rear sway bar, rod end links, bushings, etc.
'90 Pontiac 6000 SE AWD: Leaking ABS unit fixed, load levelling rear suspension fixed, still slow

[This message has been edited by Will (edited 12-12-2003).]

Gotcha.

FWIW - I know people have been wondeirng when they're actually going to see an actual car from me. Probably not for a while yet. I probably won't be able to show very much of my car until after the fact, because I am negotiating for a magazine deal. It would be marketing suicide for me to put anything on the internet before the magazine has first dibs - they don't like featuring "I saw that already" stuff.

I am doing things a bit differently with my car (of course) but I am also open to help develop the universal systems you are working on (if my help is ever needed).

perk

I get what youre saying Will and applaud your efforts. It is a whole lot easier to just change a pivot point rather then swap or even make a new cradle. I will be interested to see how far you get with Pre88 stuff.

Having said that, my engineers seem to really prefer the 88 cradle over the 87 before even looking at geometry . . . although they are going to modify the trailing arm to be mounted in double shear. . . so thats what Im going to be working with in the racecar.

quote Originally posted by Will: Well... the primary stumbling block to getting everyone on the same page has been that the early cars and '88's don't use the same stuff. By making them use a lot of the same stuff, things are simplified dramatically. I think that a control arm is best with the '88 knuckle and early cradle. Using separate links dramatically reduces triangulation against the 500 ftlbs of torque that you'll be putting to the ground. Unless you ALSO add a trailing arm into the mix... but that complicates things (unnecessarily, IMO). Now fixing the early suspension certainly involves moving a pivot point or two. Need to get rid of the tiny bit of semi-trailing arm behaviour that it has, as well as the pro-squat, but I don't think those two tasks will be very difficult at all.

OK. I'm going to disagree with myself here. ..

I didn't really sleep last night and got thinking that you could independently damp the seats in a vehicle and that would isolate the driver and passengers from road harshness.. ... you would want to stiffly spring the driver's seat so that he doesn't move too much relative the steering wheel .....but

quote Originally posted by Howard_Sacks: The ride is going to be harsh if set up for performance. It comes down to damper tuning if nothing else. The optimum damping ratio for road-holding is .45 while the optimum for ride is .15. Most US manufactures are using a .25 ratio which means a 25% critical damping of the unsprung mass.

I have an 87 GT and was gonna swap in an 88 cradle, now i am having second thoughts on that.