So you think you want to build a car

Knurled wrote: A less charitable person would say that the suspension's design is entirely satisfactory for its intended application: a car that spends most of its time inoperable and sulking in a garage.

"The ideal is the enemy of the good enough."

I'd rather see a car with an inferior suspension actually being driven on the road than hear someone who's all talk, no build go on about their ultimate design that only exists in SolidWorks.

I'm not saying that's you. You're a GRMer, which means you're probably creating some insane subaru-powered East German creation in your garage with hockey pucks for motor mounts, toilet plungers as mission critical seals on the rear end, parts from a zamboni and a tank, and a roll cage that's mounted to the chassis in 36 places.

Don't get me wrong, it works, but a lot of things "work", you know?

And hockey pucks? Puh-LEEZE. I have old broken-ass OEM mounts, with a chain holding the driver's side together, and the passenger side has broken so many times that it's permanently kinked so I used an old brake pad to shim it back up to level. (No, really.)

This thread:

Knurled wrote: And hockey pucks? Puh-LEEZE. I have old broken-ass OEM mounts, with a chain holding the driver's side together, and the passenger side has broken so many times that it's permanently kinked so I used an old brake pad to shim it back up to level. (No, really.)

If I'd known that, I'd have used it......you've posted here enough to know that every thing I mentioned has been done by some GRMer....my only fiction was pretending that all of that it happened on the same build. FWIW, the Staniforth describes some people just as crazy in his books:

"In the manner of many sparetime projects, it proceeded erratically over the next 3 1/2 years. As it progressed, Ray kept a note of the sources of many of the parts used. It made a strange directory of motorsport: F1, F2, F3, FF, Reliant, Morris Minor, Mini, VW, Imp, commercial tanker, combine harvester, redundant coffee table, and a cup from a dolly's tea set." - Staniforth on the 0mag2/Reliant race car

"First they turned the engine round back to front so they could take a chain drive from the gearbox...Alert engineers will have perceived that without some precaution the car would end up going backwards in four gears and forward in only one...turning the axle upside down cured this" - Alan Staniforth on the design of the 1973 Warren/Reliant racecar.

Knurled wrote: The Jag rearend design is garbage. All lateral AND longitudinal location is done by a single link. Toe changes aplenty when the bushings allow it to move around. There's a reason it was only ever used in fairly low-powered cars. I strongly suspect that the real reason that they went with inboard brakes is that the upright-on-a-stick wouldn't cope with the twisting loads that the brake caliper would put on it, so they put the calipers on the rearend. I AM glad to see that he fixed what I feel is the worst flaw in the front suspension. The upper control arm has extremely little support as-produced. Hand pressure on the tire, such as when checking for wheel bearing or ball joint play, can flex the frame a quarter inch! I'd hate to see what it does with actual loads on it. A less charitable person would say that the suspension's design is entirely satisfactory for its intended application: a car that spends most of its time inoperable and sulking in a garage.

Yeah V12 jags had just about no power or torque! The design worked fine for hundreds of thousands of cars. Considering when it was built and what it's contemporary’s had it was an excellent system. Most other lux and sports cars of the period (BMW/Merc/Porsche) all had semi trailing arms with their own host of issues, let’s not even talk about leaf sprung solid axles.

<== biased (using solid axle in datsun replica)

Adrian_Thompson wrote: Most other lux and sports cars of the period (BMW/Merc/Porsche) all had semi trailing arms with their own host of issues, let’s not even talk about leaf sprung solid axles.

Hey! If it was good enough for Colin Chapman.....

In reply to JoeyM:

I've personally got nothing against a decent solid axle, it was more a rebuke of Knurled's post saying how crappy the Jag IRS was when it worked fine for many years and was better than many/most of its contemporary’s