Wednesday, May 25, 2022

Front suspension - how do you know what spring to get?

 Yesterday I ordered my steel plate for my front suspension supports (those protruding from chassis at the nose) and my tube for constructing the rigid members.

The front axle will be mounted on a box which will sit between two springs;  a large one above and a smaller one below. This type of suspension, most commonly seen on Morgans, is called a sliding pillar, and I have talked about this before.

The sliding pillar is at the nose of the car and either you can think of the front axle sliding up and down it (when the wheels go over bumps), or you can think of it as being the car that is sliding up and down the pillar, whether the car is in motion or not. 

At the start of the project I'd thought that I'd have sliding pillars at the ends of my axles, with my central spring being only a dummy one, to retain the aesthetics of the car, and for that I had taken the advice of David Dupaquier, who has applied these very successfully, and also Rhys Nolan who has also taken David's advice and has been experimenting with them. 

I have asked Springmasters how they would go about working out what springs I'd need. At present I think that for this "O" Level maths failure it would be safest to go with a simplistic notion of taking a spring capable of accepting the load equivalent to my weight and the car's....pivoting on the back wheels, which intuitively tells me, straight away, that it isn't as simple as just the all-up-weight...then trying that out to start with, then trying softer or stronger from there?

What would you do?

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