I went back to read the post. sounds like you think the car would do ok with the CPP set up. maybe just ride a bit harsher on bumps? do to not having any bushing to asorbe some road shock.
Mr. Reenmachine.....Would a set of roller springs from opentracker take care of that harshness? (if that is even a word!!) lol if used on this set up by CPP?
i would love the rrsp set up. but way to expensive for me. that is why this CPP set up with upper and lower arms interests me so much.
To refresh everyone's recollection, here is the basic CPP kit:
Looking at this hardware, it appears that the first step, after removal of the OE lower control arm and the strut rod, is to cut off the brackets for the front ends of the strut rods. Then you flip the big C-shaped subframe upside down and bolt it onto the frame rails and across the radiator support. The purpose of the subframe is to supply a mounting point for the forward leg of the new tubular lower control arm. It also appears that the rear of the new tubular
LCA will use the OE
LCA's mounting point.
When you think about it, the configuration of the OE
LCA/strut rod assembly is similar to the CPP A-frame
LCA. The difference is that the OE assembly mounts the forward leg to the frame with giant rubber pads on either side of the mounting bracket, captured between washers, while the forward CPP kit uses a pivot bolt inside a rubber (or polyurethane?) bushing. Also, the OE A-frame puts the two pivot points a lot further apart.
So how would these difference affect ride harshness? I think that's just guesswork. The CPP setup is typical of all production unequal length control arm setups using A-frame
LCA's. Production cars today generally ride pretty smooth. So it's safe to conclude that there is nothing in the CPP setup that would necessarily result in a harsh ride. Many other factors contribute to harshness: tire aspect ratio, shock absorbers, spring rate, and chassis stiffness being the main factors. Depending on the durometer rating of the bushings, I would expect the CPP setup to ride smoother than the common rod end (aka Heim joint) strut rods that many of us are using up front.
I would also expect, that if you went with the CPP
upper control arms, which appear to use the same kind of rubber or poly of bushings as their
LCA's do, that you would get a smoother ride than with the OE steel-on-steel bushings, or the Global West "del-alum" (a delrin bushing inside an aluminum bushing) or the Total Control Products rod end setups.
The Opentracker rollerized spring perches are kind of mysterious to me. Here is my understanding, which may or may not be correct: the OE setup uses a pivot inside a rubber bushing. This pivot binds in the bushing, i.e., it does not want the spring perch to rotate in response to UCA movement. This hampers the ability of the spring/shock assembly to compress freely. In other words, you hit a small bump and nothing happens, other than the tire sidewalls flexing -- the
suspension itself does not move. That is the very definition of ride harshness.
The Opentracker rollerized spring perch eliminates the pivot binding part of this process. These perches rotate very readily. So the
suspension can move that much, right away -- enough to rotate the perch to keep it square to the spring/shock assembly and to convey all the bump energy directly to the spring/shock assembly, rather than to the binding of spring perch bushing.
The other mysterious quality of the rollerized spring perch is its effect on steering effort. Everybody who installs a set comments on this. I think this has to do with the camber change that occurs when you steer the front wheels. That camber change puts a compression force on the
suspension. Again, with the OE spring perch, the first obstacle to that compression is the binding of the spring perch's pivot and its bushing. You have to overcome that binding with your own arm strength. But with the rollerized spring perch, that binding doesn't happen. The spring perch rotates freely in response to the camber change.
So there you go, a nice long web message post written by an amateur hobbyist who may or may not know wtf he's talking about.