Hi,
I've seen the Revington setup - looks pretty neat, but there's not a lot of
suspension travel from the looks of it.
I've also seen a really nice coil-over setup on a Real Race Car(tm) TR6.
That would be Sam Halkias (5th 99 SCCA Runoffs(tm)) and TR6 racer par
excellance. Sam's got a lot of tricks on his car and I would love to drive
that puppy someday.
That being said, if you're not willing to really hack up your TR6, you
might as well forget about coil overs... front or rear.
The basis for a coil-over setup is a substantial structure. In those cars
that I've looked at closely (the Halkias car and the Group 44 TR6), the
shocks are tied to members of the roll cage. This give two benefits.
1. The rear diagonal braces from the main hoop run all the way to the back
of the car. These stand proud of the front diff upper cross memeber (and
incidentally the upper spring perch in the stock setup) by a significant
amount - maybe 12 inches or more. This means you can put a HUGE shock
absorber in there.
2. The rigidity of this setup is pretty significant. I never got to ask the
owners of the cars what they were running for spring rates, but I'll bet it
was closer to "stock" than what you have to run to reduce body roll in a
normal TR6. But the bottom line is that you need to turn your TR6 into a
"tube-frame" setup to get the tie-in points that you need for the
shock/spring units that make up a coil-over setup.
So, you can do it, but it's a pretty large engineering task.
Note: on Sam Halkias's car, the upper shock tower in the front is
completely re-worked to accomodate the longer shock/spring.
Also note: on the Group 44 (ex Newman) TR6, the trailing arms are re-worked
pretty excessively to accomodate the additional loading that the shock
setup induces. That "little tab" that the lever shock attaches to
apparently is prone to break off. But I didn't see any upper bump stop on
that car, so maybe at the upper limit of trailing arm movement the shock
mount was able to twist things in there... not sure, but there was lots of
aluminium welded in there.
In short, I'd say that unless you were building an all out race car - it's
probably not worth the effort.
Anyone wanna help me design a setup like this???
;-)
rml
=====================================================================
Bob Lang | TR 6 Guy | Editor: New England Triumphs
Phone: | 617-253-7438 (days)| 781-438-2568 (eves)
Occupation: | ComputerZ | TR fixer-Upper
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