3/15/13

Aw screw it.  We’ll go to Goodguy’s.  I know if we went to the shop we’d go into the paint booth and start looking at the Spit… and we do not need to look at the Spit until Lil' Wiggly is DONE!  John couldn’t, to the best of my recollection, remember why we were going to ditch the IRS in the Spit either.  I did have a look at pictures of it online while talking to John and fingered out why it sucks so badly.  Juan might want to blame using the transverse leaf spring as the upper control arm, but I don’t think that is the problem.  No, I think the problem is the fact that by using the leaf spring as the upper control arm, the upper control arm is essentially half the width of the car.  The lower control arm, on the other hand, is only about half that long.  So you have a really long arm swinging the top of the upright through a big lazy arc and a really short arm swinging the bottom of the upright in a tight frantic arc.  The positive camber gain is atrocious!  There is a picture of a Spit in a sharp left-hand turn with the rear suspension so jacked into droop that the right wheel has about 45° of positive camber, the car is leaning about twenty degrees to the right, and the left wheel has about 30° positive camber… and looks to be hanging in the air.  We gotta do something about that.  The first thought I had was to make a shorter top arm and remove the transverse leaf.  My second thought was to make a longer lower arm pivoted closer to the differential.  Now I'm thinking we do what I discussed about the front and make DLR uprights out of 240Z rear struts… along with DLR control arms of course.  I can see some “Handling by DLR” decals in the car’s future.  Of course we could make some strut towers protrude into the trunk and use 240Z struts.  Or we could put in a live axle.  Oh right, I want to use that welded differential and 4.11:1 R&P.  Live axle it is!  I'm not 100% sure how we’re going to do that either, but it otter be doable.  I imagine the axle will sit above the frame with forward links locating it somehow.  As for springing it… we’ll have to wait and see what we have with which to work.  Feh, I'm bored with this.  I think I'm going to call it a week and go home.  I'll talk to y'all again Monday.