gassman

What affect does spacers have on suspension, bearings, ball joints? 12mm front and 17mm rear wheel/hub-centric.

TexasIS

Bump for answer

KKelly

Typically, they will have no real effect on those items but it will increase scrub radius (not sure if this is necessarily bad).

http://www.hrsprings.com/site/techni...rubradius.html

Also, sometime you may get some shake or vibration if they aren't seated just right. I was running spacers along with a hub correction ring on my track tires and always had a wobble. Now I have wheels with a different offset and don't need to use them.

Yours aren't HUGE but they aren't small either.

Irishman06

Scrub radius can affect tire wear, and will make vehicle pulls due to traction differences worse. You can see increased wheel bearing wear because there's essentially a larger moment arm on the knuckle, but its probably not significant.

The more I think about it, the sweeter it would be if we could make some custom steering knuckles to fix all our suspension worries. Who's got a CMM we can borrow to take points from the current one?

lobuxracer

iTrader: (2)

The way the front is made, you could just trim the top of the existing one and put a shim underneath the two bottom bolts. the hard part would be fixing the top where the ball joint connects.

1022it

Irishman, i have a B&S CMM easily accessible. the measurable area is about 34" wide, 80" long and 36" tall. it is a HP (High Precision model) so i can measure repeatable to .0001". it is run via PC-DIMIS.

however, i am not taking my vehicle apart since i am leaving all the suspension alone; so if anyone is willing to fess up a knuckle or two, i will be willing to provide a STEP or IGES exported file of the knuckles. from there you could design anythign you want from it on a program such as solidwerks, ideas (what i use), or AutoCAD.

making a program and getting all the data you need should only take me a weekend max (16 hours).

lobuxracer

iTrader: (2)

You'll need to model all four of them. Are you saying it would take about 4 hours each?

The idea would be to keep the external dimensions, but move the hub center up about an inch and a half. That would lower the car with none of the usual negative effects.

BTW Irishman06 - you realise they're forged aluminium, right?

Irishman06

Having a whole model is nice, but I was only being mildly serious. If there's a couple of us who are willing to each chip in a bit o' time (CMM, maybe some FEA on the current model to get an idea of the design loads, then a new design), we might have an idea on our hands. In terms of design, I'd probably go with something CNC as a replacement, with packaging and strength concerns dictating design. My biggest idea for a change was adjustable camber via shims, but we could probably also design a setup for a series of custom brake caliper mounts (can someone say supra brakes?). And if we wanted to go totally crazy, we could design them for some centerlocks and have uber-leet wheels.

Forged aluminum isn't as bad a sign as, say...cast iron or forged steel would have been. My worry was that they were already something so strong that you wouldn't be able to achieve something similar by a cheaper manufacturing method.