Hello guys,
Back for some more sage advice.
73' Convertible, 351C 4BBL, C6 Automatic
I am starting the project of improving my car handling. Reading posts; this is what I am planning to do.
1) Brace the car 1st:- Which braces do you guys reco? I saw a post w/ straight brace along the car length. Tinman fabrication. They are not a perfect fit in a 71-73, but if you take a little of the offset out of them they are.
Shouldn't there be a X-brace? If yes anybody has recos...
You can do an X-brace or a Z-brace, I don't know of any, should be easy to fabricate. Not sure it is needed, but if you can build one that won't interfere with exhaust or driveshaft it wouldn't hurt.
2) Front and rear independent suspension:- Leaning towards StreetorTrack.com kits
Rear independent suspension is not offered in a kit that I know of. I would think that a rear independent suspension conversion would be a HUGE pain, with little gain. You can keep the straight axle and go with a 3 or 4 link setup. Street or track, and Total Control both have those. Personally I dislike the multilink rear setups. I think they are overly complicated and offer many more points to fail in the future, along with some pretty major car surgery. In the back I think 4 1/2 leafs are fine, with a small adjustable sway bar and a watts link or panhard bar if desired. There are plenty of cars out on the autocross mopping up the track with rear leafs. If you had some ludicrous amount of horsepower than I could say it would be reasonable to do a multilink.
Up front many of the kits are similar. Opentacker, Street or Track, PTP Engineering, Total Control, Hotchkis, Maier Racing. Some of them are more track oriented in my opinion, since they use heim joints or other pivots that won't last forever with road crud. Some of the more expensive ones have neat pivots that are serviceable and sealed. The front coil over kits are mixed. There are upper control arm coil over kits and lower control arm coil over kits. Personally I like the UCA kits, because it keeps the loading on the spindle and ball joints as it was from the factory. That being said there are some advantages to the LCA kits, one of which is that the coil over assembly is mounted lower, so you can get to the spring adjustment while the shock tower / bumpstop brace is still on the car. There is also a wide variety of component and shock quality available. Many of the strut rod kits move the pivot point in and shorten the strut rod, this will result in more caster change throughout the travel of the front suspension. I have no idea if this is a good or bad thing, but it is something to be aware of. Opentracker and Maier both sell a pivot system that keeps the geomerty stock, and the the Total control strut rod only moves the pivot point a tiny amount compared to the setups offered by many others that use a heim joint. Personally on my car I have a mix. Maier Racing coil over kit (UCA style), Total control strut rods and Hotchkis lower control arms.
3) rear wheel disc brakes:- Again Streetortrack.com kit.
Their 12" kit looks great. If I was doing my rear brakes over again today those are the ones I would choose.
Rush
Have fun shopping,
Peter