You can see that the upper trailing arm angularity is now corrected on a lowered car and the instant center is now several feet more forward and in the proper location. We will be adding anti-rust treatment and seam sealer back here to prevent rust from forming and to eliminate gaps where smoke can come into the cabin.
Here is another view from the side. If you have ever owned an AE86 that was lowered a lot you know what the wheelhop feels like and you have also probably experienced twitchy handling at the limit. The T3 parts address all of these issues and eliminate them.
These are T3’s latest traction brackets, we ordered some and will be installing them and our new T3 lower trailing arms later.
T3 makes these cool rear swaybar mounts that correct the rear swaybar geometry on lowered cars. They lower the swaybar to close to the stock location and eliminate the odd angles of the endlinks. When paired with our Whiteline adjustable swaybars, we will have good control of our rear roll stiffness.
We are also using T3’s frame-side end link mounts. This allows you to use all 4 holes of the adjustable Whiteline rear bar while keeping the endlinks at an efficient 90-degree angle to the bar. This helps the rear bar stay at its maximum effectiveness no matter what adjusting hole the end link is in or what ride height the car is set at.
6 comments
Well, that’ll do it! It’s actually interesting to me how many pretty well regarded cars moved to equal length 4-link rear suspension instead of… well, many other things. Not messing with setting anything up in CAD and going through the motions right now, but are there any issues with the upper links and lower links not being in the same plane, or “maybe in theory but not really”?
They have to be out of plane if you are going to have anti-squat which any 4 link needs at least a little of.
I meant in terms of the upper links being further inboard on the axle, to be clear; a lot of the implementation I’ve seen of, for example, 4-links under rally cars the box that was added here would contain top and bottom links instead of just top.
I suspect that some of this upper link stuff was done for interior packaging like it was on the FB RX-7 but ugh dealing with the consequences of that decision.
In this case, they are in the same location as stock. The factory doesn’t do this because they want to have a rear seat.
Mike, any thoughts as to whether it’d be worth using those boxes to add chassis rigidity if you’re converting to 3 link, or is it sort of moot at that point, since you’d be permanently tying the cage to the chassis at that point to provide positive location for the middle upper link anyway?
One of these days I’ll get started on my rotary 86, I swear!
You would have to do one in a three-link conversion. Don’t do a short upper link,