My Rear Coil Overs
 

Work in progress. As you can see there are some clearance issues and a few custom parts on there. The spring is just there for test purposes that will not be the length i use.

http://i38.tinypic.com/245adco.jpg
http://i37.tinypic.com/2s6on4n.jpg
http://i33.tinypic.com/103stx4.jpg
http://i35.tinypic.com/33cu3kh.jpg
http://i33.tinypic.com/24oxflj.jpg
http://i34.tinypic.com/2ldd7gw.jpg

Interesting. What are you going to do to reinforce the top strut mount?

This is what i have so far, still perfecting it.
http://i36.tinypic.com/2lxa04l.jpg
http://i33.tinypic.com/14jxjkl.jpg
http://i35.tinypic.com/1110yt2.jpg
http://i35.tinypic.com/2iia90l.jpg
http://i37.tinypic.com/esniih.jpg

Good, just checking to make sure you had your head on straight. :)

I'm not enough of an expert to tell you if what you're doing will work or not,
but I admire your pioneering nature. What are your plans for the car? Racing?

HaHa I'm not expert either. That was my 2nd time welding in those pics. It was gonna be an SCCA car but their rule book doesn't like my way of doing things so its going to be a drift car. I raced go karts for years so the drifting thing is just something new to try. Ill put more pics of the car and my work up later. Right now its all in pieces.

I have been drawing up a design to run a very similar setup for a few years now. In my (non expert) opinion you should bring tube back from the roll bar hoop, and weld it to plates fastened to the top of the rear unibody frame rails. Triangulating the new tubing into the existing rearward bar, and the new strut top hats would give you enough strength to manage the loads. In your current setup all the load is being spread to sheet metal, the hat may be strong, but the surrounding bits are only sheet. I haven't had the luxury of time to build, so i may be over-engineering, but IMHO better safe than sorry :)

Isaac


On a side note, what part of Wa are you in?

i will do some more reinforcing and probably weld a plat across the shock mount on the diff.

The welding looks good to me. Yes, you will need to reinforce this area of the car. Keep in mind that the loading is verticle from the shock mounts.

Why did you go this route with your springs? Curious because I will have the option in my new SCCA class - STU.

The welds are not super hot but they'll hold. What route would you have gone?

I use the stock spring location. My decision to do it this way was driven by the SCCA class rules (Improved Touring) that I am governed by. These same rules apply in SCCA E Production. In short, I am not allowed to relocate the springs on the car. The relocation of the spring is allowed in SCCA Grand Touring (GT1, GT2, GT3 and GTL) and in SCCA Super Touring Under and Super Touring Over. Since I am looking to move to STU, rear coil over shocks/springs is something I have thought about.

What I have done is to use the stock spring location and then install a ride height adjuster on top of the spring. To do this I purchased 5” coil springs that had a rate that was lower than I wanted and then removed coils until the desired rate was achieved. Besides giving me the spring rate I needed this netted me a spring with a short free height so that the ride height adjuster could be used. I used a 190lb spring to make a 250lb spring and ride height adjuster is from ISC. I think ReSpeed makes them too

The stock rear spring placement on an FB is good – on the axle - and the spring pocket on the car is pretty sturdy. 5” springs are cheap – they use them on Stock Cars. Adjusting ride height is not too bad but not as easy as working with a coil over adjuster. I can make an adjustment at the track in about 15-30 minutes and I have found this to be a pretty valuable tuning tool. Adding wedge to the rear axle can help the car rotate into high speed turns and carry more speed through sweepers.

Well I'm gonna try this set-up and if it fails ill go with the re-speed adjustable springs. My car will also have a pan-hard.