Thursday, April 5, 2012

LCA fitted and running~

Finally, wednesday~ it was the day in a week i had the least customer~ So i decided it's a good time for me to took out the old worn lower arm and fit in the new set i just done. 

It's 10.45 in the morning~ 
 The first arm came out at around 12.30PM~ had a bit of hiccup on the Caster arm. And only to realize that the RCA+short steering won't fit onto my knuckle for i had altered the brake bracket to hold the twin pod from evo3~ So had to use back original power steering knuckle. 

And upon fitment, another problem occurs when my brake disc was grinding onto the LCA when turning. As the culprit was my 'stubborn' design on maintaining the steering turning angle and used a deeper offset brake disc on the original AE86 knuckle. 

But nothing cannot be solve with a bit of grinning and cutting~ lol~ a few moments after it was fitted in and with the extended tie rod from KM36, went in without any argument~ All and all, it was 3.30PM already~ yaiks~ All the calculation goes well with stock AE86 systems. So, at least it let me know when others might running a RX7 rotor or so, it might not fit. Have to took in consideration when redesign my next BETA version~ lol

After a short rest it's time to went to the tyre shop~!
 A show from under~ was setting it to 25mm+extended arm 20mm which i had 45mm on hand which give me about 3 degree of chamber on each side. 
 42mm on the left for my crossmember wasn't dead centre and chassis wasn't really perfect as well. This is the magic of Lower Control Arm, we can set the lower arm to compromise our pillow mount to get accurate chamber we want and still can fiddle with the pillow mount when running on daily basis.
 how mango looks with -3.5 degree of chamber~ 
 a shot on the alignment machine~ the toe was set to -0.30 later on each side.
 My steering radius had increase slightly but due to the RCA+short steering knuckle won't fit so i can't get more turning angle. (plus the twin pod caliper was 'crushing' onto the caster rod already.

As everything was looking nice and tidy~


Sh*t does happened if we wasn't paying attention!!!

I run over a curb @ a corner which i drive over everyday~ As my usual cruising entry speed of 60 over the wide 90 degree corner, mango should understeer a bit so it's my habit to correct the steering a bit to get close to the curb. And i totally FORGOTTEN  that i had just installed a LCA and have -3.5 camber~! And mango wasn't understeer as it should. And i clipped the curb at around 50km/h and BANG! mango was throw a few feet to the opposite direction. Fortunately, i was just clipped the curb with the rim's lips, and i still manage to drive mango all the way back to my shop. 

Lesson learn~ always remember each new parts installed, takes a few days to get used to the new setting before pushing it to the limits.

As for me the down side is, i need to check whether the rims still can be repaired. Or i need to find another replacement d.

The up side. The new LCA holds up the the impacts and didn't even nudge a bit. I, know it's strong enough to take a thrashing~ 

See you all on sunday~ at the Pop Cones~! Cheerio~ 

2 comments:

Unknown said...

very impressive on the new LCA, haha u shouldnt have push it so soon, lesson noted thanks!

Kae Huang Tan said...

yup justin, i had to learn it the hard way~ lol~

hope it'll keep me alert the rest of my life on new settings.