<< Our roads suck. Hence the springing for ride and handling,
the car is much faster with all wheels on the ground. Also, heim joints in
a street car are money wasted up here. The "traction master" type bars
would eliminate my wheel hop but they transmit road noise and break mounts.
Jack Emery>>
I agree that Heim joints are a pain on the road and always get too much dust
and not enough lubrication. I run Heims ('rose' joints, to members in the
mother country) on my race cars, and regularly clean and grease them (at least
the ones with nipples, like the tie rod ends; the non-nippled ones just get
cleaned and sprayed with silicon lube). That would never happen on the street.
When was the last time you changed you diff oil, or trans oil? Thought so.
I have had good luck with a 3 link rear suspension, one below each leaf (this
would reduce clearance on the street, and is probably a bad idea, especially
for bumpy roads) and one top link which locates and limits spring wind up. I
just haven't bothered to add the final top link which would allow me to
replace the leaves with 'floating' springs, either fibreglass or steel, or
toss them away altogether and use coil-overs. I prefer to be reactionary and
stick with the perfectly adequate, if not quite as neat, original set up.
If you aren't doing a lot of standing starts (we stopped this about 15 years
ago in local racing I was on the club and in charge of rules, and countered
the "if it was good enough for Le Mans, it's good enough for us" crowd with
"How would you like a ton of rapidly accelerating MGA up your butt when you
blow a shift/break something, or whatever?), then spring wind up may be
secondary to traction, and an LSD will work wonders without any added traction
bars, though a single top link is very useful.
I can't recommend a welded diff for street or slalom use, although it works
passingly well (except in the rain) on the track.
Bill S.
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