For the first time in my life, I got in a car with 'new' levers the other
day. As some of you know, my girlfriend bought a '59 bugeye. The PO had
the shocks completely rebuilt, and I must say that they are amazing. It
sure beats the wallowing around that the ones on my B do. I must say, 41
years old or not they are damn amazing shocks when they are in working
order. I will admit, that I have had my B for 14 years and haven't ever
even looked to see if there is oil in the shocks and I doubt the PO ever
touched them either. I wonder how many people replace the levers without
ever even looking to see if they have fluid in them. It seems to me that
all british fluid systems (hydrolic(?),cooling,oil,etc) were designed to
leak at such a rate that if consistantly topped up, they would never need
changing. I don't see why shocks should be any different.
Unfortunately the levers are expensive and that makes them unatractive to
many DD cars, but I don't feel like they are inadequate. Naturally this is
all IMO.
James Nazarian
'71 B roadster
'71 BGT ever so slowly turning into a V8
'63 Buick 215
"Aerodynamics are for people who cannot build engines"
Enzo Ferrari
On Wed, 26 Jul 2000 WSpohn4@aol.com wrote:
> A further note on this topic, vis a vis the several posts that cite what a
> difference it makes when you replace the Armstrongs with tube shocks.
>
> Reminds me of a couple of other car groups. One deals with a make of car that
> uses electric cooling fans. Many people there replace their old failing units
> with new snazzy Bosch fans and draw the conclusion that the factory fitments
> (which were probably barely turning over before being replaced) were
> inherently inferior.
>
> Similarly, another group I frequent often deals with a front brake upgrade to
> different callipers from another model. They take their stock callipers with
> 100,000 miles (translated from the metric for the ex-colonial readership),
> and replace them with new units (which, BTW necessitates a master cylinder
> change), and then swear that the factory didn't know what they were doing
> putting inadequate brakes on the cars in the first place.
>
> When I, or someone else with more than a pair of ganglia to their name, point
> out that if they had just replaced the worn out units with new ones, they
> would have had the same improvement, many of them are, how shall I put
> this... too damned dense... to see the point.
>
> Same thing with Armstrong shocks. They are actually exceptionally good for an
> OE shock - NO other make that I can think of that was fitted to new cars in
> that period would go 1/4 as long as a properly maintained Armstrong would.
> Some of the 60s Japanese cars had 10,000 mile shocks fitted!
>
> I am not saying that there are no gains in fitting a tube shock in place of a
> lever shock - just that most people would neither notice, nor care about the
> difference.
>
> It will be the rare driver indeed that really benefits from a switch to tube
> shocks, but many more owners will do the conversion, not because they need
> to, but for the same reason they do many other add-ons like Mallory
> distributors, negative camber A arms, mag wheels etc. They just want to do
> it, for reasons often tied up with image, or the simple desire to work on
> their toy and believe that they are accomplishing something.
>
> Many mods are neutral - they don't harm the car's performance, but some are
> detrimental. I had one friend that insisted on fitting Ferodo DS11 pads to
> his MGB. Many of you may not know what they are. They were a very good racing
> compound (I used them for years before switching to a carbon/kevlar pad, when
> the asbestos containing DS11 became unavailable for my Twincam), but they
> were a racing pad that needed to be warm before they worked. I regularly
> swung the ass of my car off the end of the first hairpin turn at the start of
> a race; the next lap, all was well and the pads had reached operating
> temperature.
>
> I told my intransigent friend that if I were the lawyer opposing him in an
> accident case, and could show that he had intentionally _reduced_ the cold
> performance of his brakes, and that had any relevance to the accident, he
> would be toast. I never did hear from him as to whether the brakes had caused
> him grief, but another guy I knew rolled his 240 Z (that's zed, not 'zee',
> you American linguistic savages!) on the first turn coming down from a ski
> hill for exactly that reason.
>
> Anyway, as I started out saying, I rather like Armstrongs....
>
> Bill S.
>
|