Thread: For those that want to go LOW, or how I extended my front control arms

IF someone did your control arm modification, and utilized the threads by Kojima, wouldn't that take them a long way towards alleviating many of the problems caused by the severe lowering? Or would they still have to engineer solutions by themselves? Ie...if they did both your and Mikes modifications, would they still have other issues to deal with?

Issues with going low in order of importance (sort of), and how to mitigate the side-effects:

Physical interference (tire rubbing) - Extreme camper, narrow tires, and stiff springs. Roll or even flare fenders. Extended suspension arms required to achieve extreme camber. You will likely never avoid rubbing entirely.
Heavily increased CV joint wear - Lower the suspension mount points on the knuckle with kit or otherwise. You will likely never see normal life regardless.
Axle bind - Shorter axle section(s) either by part swapping or welding. This problem can be completely avoided.
Increased bump steer - Bumpsteer kit or home-brew. Also lower the suspension mount points on the knuckle with kit or otherwise. You will likely always experience some bumpsteer (similar to stock or slightly lowered).
Increased roll couple - Lower the suspension mount points on the knuckle with kit or otherwise. You will likely never get a "good" roll couple.

Perhaps Shawn, but to be honest, it has been a long time since I thought about the suspension geometry on my car as what I came up with worked for me and now I am on to something new. It has been even longer since I read Kojima's threads on the subject.

Ideally what you would want to do would be to raise the suspension pick up points as well as the engine. The former would help maintain the geometry while the latter would help your axles. As you can see, this would be an extremely complex task, at least the suspension points would be. Raising the engine would not be too bad I suppose.

I keep thinking back to Greg Amy who raced an ITA NX2000 to P1 at the SCCA ARRC. He found that in his development of the chassis, the less movement of the suspension that was allowed, the faster the car was. I.e. he ended up with somewhere near 900lb springs in front and 1000lb springs in the rear! Not really what you want to do with a street car!!!!

Basically, the geometry is crap to begin with so anything you do will be like polishing a turd. You just have to polish it to a sheen that works for you!

Good write up can you hook me up with a set?...lol j/k i read it all. I love the way your car looks always have.

Awesome write up man, i plan on doing this to my daily also.

thanks for the great post, writeup and pix! couple questions:
1. Since you measured it in the past, how low can you go or how much drop before the axle binds?

2. On YOUR car, is this permanent? or what do you do in case you raise the car up? Do you switch back to your old LCA or leave it and just raise it w/ the modded LCA?

Thanks again!

I do not have that information. You will have to follow my instructions in the first post to measure the plunge on your car at different ride heights. Each car may be a bit different.




Yes, well mostly. Once you modify the control arms like I have it is easiest to just swap them out for a stock set rather than cutting and rewelding them back to the original length.

You could just raise the car back up with the modified control arms, but this may pull too much on the inner CV boot. You would have to check that and see. While there is about 2" or so of travel available in the inner CV cup, the boot does not have that much travel.

But really, why would you want to raise it back up???




J/K

russell im just wondering does it matter how long i extend them? or do i have to extend them 1/2 like you did?

hmong, you need to figure out what will work for your car. Did you take the plunge measurements like I described in the first post? You need to find a baseline so you know where you are going from there. For my race car, I had my axle shortened by 1/2" which solved all of my problems. That is how I determined the neet to extend the front control arm by 1/2". I would not reccomend extending too far. This is not a case of "if a little is good, a lot will be better". You just need to to the amount that will allow your suspension and axle to work.