191 replies to this topic

[Ioku]

So back in January me and a friend picked up this 88 GL-10 that had a blown up engine for $150, I lucked out and got a clutch LSD for my Impreza and he got rear disks and fancy interior parts for his Loyale. And I ended up with the rest of the car.

I had always wanted to lift one of these older Subaru's and now I have one.

One of the main this I wanted to deal with on the car was the suspension, this will be a sort of dakar rally prerunner car that can also handle some trails, So the most important thing is having suspension travel. So its out with the struts and in with duel A-arms. I also wanted to use EJ axles because there longer and can handle harder angles so I modded some EJ Knuckles to accept Toyota upper ball joints.








I think this crazy creation of mine is the first one made for a subaru.

Ordered up a bunch of these





they're 3/4 with high offset spacers

I also modded the crossmember to bring the control arm mounts forward and remove the problem of having the axle hitting the stock mount when at hard drop.







I'm going with a 3 in drivetrain drop, the rest will be in the suspension



modded the rear control arm mounts to accept the heim joints, also moved the mounting point back and in and incorporated the trans crossmember drop mounts.





Started mocking up how the front suspension will be set up.

[Uberoo]

subscribed.looks very interesting.

[smackvt]

yes iv been envisioning this for a while now . r u thinking costom a arms with longer cv's ...... ? alot longer ? i was looking at cheep uper balljoints / a arm from like a ford exp....... show me more

[maozebong]

BADASS.

how much travel are you going to have in this bad boy?

[Idasho]

fun stuff. Keep it coming

[Ioku]

Got the lower A arms built, now on to fabbing brackets for the uppers and building those.

[Ioku]

yes iv been envisioning this for a while now . r u thinking costom a arms with longer cv's ...... ? alot longer ? i was looking at cheep uper balljoints / a arm from like a ford exp....... show me more

Just using EJ CV axles front and rear there longer than EA82 axles and seem to be better at taking hard angles. If I had the money I'd like to build axles with slip joints in them like a driveshaft, so you could really extend them.

BADASS.

how much travel are you going to have in this bad boy?

I'd like 12 inches travel if I can, but would be happy with 10.

(Thats what she said)

[Numbchux]

Very nice. Awesome start!


Any reason you went with ball joints instead of heims? I think that will be your limiting factor travel-wise, and since you've already got heims all over the place, you'll still have all the noise. The stock toyota BJs get thrown out the window with the JD Fab long travel kit in favor of heims.

[Ioku]

Actually I don't know why I never thought of that, I was looking at that upper ball joint worried that I may not have enough range of motion. And at least for the ball joint a heim will work well, thats the one that will need to handle harsher angles anyways because of the shorter upper arms.

[Ioku]

So I tested it out and that will work great, It will also make fabbing the upper arms easier.





Thats what I love about message boards like this, you get new ideas from other people, sometimes working alone you get stuck in a way of doing things and become blind to new ideas.

[Idasho]

Do those CVs have enough slip to allow the knuckle to droop that far?

It seems that having that much droop, regardless of how the CV angles are, will find the overall length limits of the axle.

Generally a large travel setup's "at rest" results in the axles being nearly flat. The large travel coming from both compression and droop.

Unless you are looking at some serious fender cutting, compression it pretty limited. That means the travel you are after needs to come from droop

[Ioku]

Well one of the advantages of a double A arm suspension is camber can be tuned to stay the same or go negative as the suspension droops so the axles will be sort of pushed back into the cups by the negative camber instead of pulled out by the positive camber change you end up with on a strut system. But really I don't know if they will have enough slip for the travel I want, I wont know till I test it out.

I plan on the at rest angle to be close the flat maybe just a little more angle than stock. I'm also going to be running 31's and will be doing a lot of fender cutting, and building some custom flares.

[smackvt]

going to build up the trany w bigger diff or swap out iner cv ends (what i ended up doing, d/r in a 1jen leg) i see that push buton sitting there ?

[smackvt]

also thinking about rear struts from a gen 3 leg out all the way around ?your thoughts

[smackvt]

my bad i see why its sitting there:lol:

[Ioku]

my bad i see why its sitting there:lol:

yeah thats the trans that came with the car its a FT4WD single range with a 3.7 diff. So I picked up a duel range at the pick and pull.

And I got something planed for the spings and shocks I'll post up some pics of what I'm thinking tomorrow.

[thatswhatshesaid]

oh, yes... this is the kind of progression we've needed for years. Can't wait to see the finished product.

[Ioku]

So this is what I'm thinking for the spings front and rear. Using a rear spring stacked with these shorter stiffer coils, they were part of some lowering springs that came on one of my Impreza's I didn't want it low so I put in some WRX springs.

I plan to put these over a shock and make a coilover, the total height of the stack is 20 in.

[Uberoo]

if you take a dremel to your hub and move the tie rod up above the pivot point rather than below it, it will reduce the angle on it so you wont get as much bump steer.

like this:



I used some soft thin washers to help fill in the beveled hole on the bottom.

still looks epic.

[Ioku]

I was thinking of doing something like that just to get the tie rods up higher and less likely to be hit by rocks, nice to know it helps with bump steer too.

But I was worried about the hole being too big after reaming it out, you said you added washers, what type were they and were did you put them.

[Numbchux]

if you take a dremel to your hub and move the tie rod up above the pivot point rather than below it, it will reduce the angle on it so you wont get as much bump steer.

like this:



I used some soft thin washers to help fill in the beveled hole on the bottom.

still looks epic.

how could this "help" with bump-steer? your tie rod and control arm are obviously on 2 different planes now.

[Uberoo]

when your suspension is adjusted downward IE suspension lift the tie rod is at a pretty steep angle.that produces alot of bumpsteer with the range of suspension travel.when the tie rod end is moved up it reduces the angle so it reduces bumpsteer a fair bit.Or at least it did on mine.tie rods seems to work best when they are as close to horizontal as possible.So moving the tie rod up helps to correct the tie rod angle from a suspension lift.

[Uberoo]

I was thinking of doing something like that just to get the tie rods up higher and less likely to be hit by rocks, nice to know it helps with bump steer too.

But I was worried about the hole being too big after reaming it out, you said you added washers, what type were they and were did you put them.

I used thin external lock washers because they would be pressed into the beveled hole by the nut.in the pic you can see a bit of a lock washer above the nut.

[Numbchux]

when your suspension is adjusted downward IE suspension lift the tie rod is at a pretty steep angle.that produces alot of bumpsteer with the range of suspension travel.when the tie rod end is moved up it reduces the angle so it reduces bumpsteer a fair bit.Or at least it did on mine.tie rods seems to work best when they are as close to horizontal as possible.So moving the tie rod up helps to correct the tie rod angle from a suspension lift.

The tie rod and control arms move on an arc. If they are in 2 different places on that arc, the toe will change over the course of the suspension travel.

In that picture, your control arm is still angled down, so as the suspension compresses, the ball joint will move outward. And the tie rod is level, so as the suspension compresses, the tie rod end will move inward. See how this could be bad?


The angle of the control arm is what keeps the roll center of the suspension high, which is crucial to the handling of a car. And having those 2 arms parallel is crucial to maintaining the alignment.

there are numerous companies that make spacers to lower those pivot points so that when the car is lowered, that geometry is maintained.

[Subruise]

semi-off topic: so verdict? tie rods flipped good or bad?\


RV