Truenotch

@Testament runs R888's on his Fiat 124 and has done quite a few Ks on them. They'll blow away any road tyre in performance and will be fine for a weekend car. They can be a bit noisey, but otherwise are great.

IMO it will be a good idea to have a decent amount of droop in the FD. I did a shitload of R&D for my MX5 suspension mods last year and found that droop travel and good urethane bump stops are both key to good suspension for the road and track. MX5's are pretty limited in compression when slammed and I assume FD's are similar. Adding good bump stops and utilising droop travel are two tricks to maximise road holding ability. Your keeper springs will need be a bit open at full droop - just enough to allow for that extra 15mm of travel. You can buy keepers from 25mm up to 70+mm in length. I would recommend something like this: https://www.trademe.co.nz/motors/car-parts-accessories/performance/suspension-braces/listing-2000560762.htm?rsqid=f6b126ce4b604edab9abc14c8ddcb068 40mm uncompressed length, 15mm compressed length, 3mm retainers. This would give you loads of room for adjustment and more than enough extra travel. You'll need to drop your spring perches by an extra 18mm from where they are now to account for the compressed spring and retainer, so they'll work well as long as you have that adjustment available.

Good stuff. You can get keepers in a few different lengths. Get some that give you as much travel as you need with a little left over (so the keepers are always slightly compressed). This will give you more flexibility for ride height changes in the future and also means you can adjust your ride height from the spring perch, instead of the lower body.

@Toddy415 - here's a simple guide from MCA suspension on how to gain droop travel with coilovers like yours: https://mcasuspension.com/technical-section/Ride-Height-Adjustment MCA don't talk about keeper springs because they don't run them in their race cars. Your springs will need to be captive for a cert, so you'll need to add a keeper spring with enough travel to allow for the extra droop (which also means dropping the spring perch a little further to account for the compressed length of the keeper).

This is only partially correct. The only reason to adjust the body instead of the perch is to keep the spring captive when making adjustments. It’s worth noting that doing this could also limit your bump (upwards) travel by causing the tyre to hit the wheel arch under full load (depending on total shock length etc). Adding shock length as required, lowering your spring perch and installing keeper springs should allow for lots of droop travel while still retaining enough bump travel. Droop travel is more important than compression travel in some situations like big bumps and drop offs.

Do you have a pic of the shocks? You should be able to adjust the body length and the spring perch if they’re the style I’m picturing.

What's the car and are they body adjustable? The correct way to get more droop is to add keeper/helper springs to your setup. It's easy to do, and if your coilovers are body adjustable there should be plenty of adjustment (body adjustment changes the total length of the shock). Here's the process I would follow: Remove springs and run suspension through its whole sweep with the wheel and tyre on. Take note of how much clearance you have at full compression (if any). You should aim to have the tyre as close to the wheel arch as possible at full compression for optimal handling. Make sure there's enough clearance for the bump stop to compress a little for big bumps (10mm minimum gap between tyre and inner guard). Use the shock body adjustment to set this height. Jack the car up and see how far it droops. Measure the distance between the centre of the hub and the wheel arch at both ends of the sweep to give yourself an idea of total available droop travel. Install your main spring (no keeper) and drop the car on the ground. Set your desired ride height for cert using the spring perches. The spring will probably be un-captive after this. Once ride height is set, jack up the car again and see how far the spring is from being captive. This will give you an idea of how long your keepers need to be. Install your keepers with spring locaters between the keeper and main spring You will need to drop the spring perch to account for the compressed length of the keeper plus the thickness of the locater to get the same ride height ??? Profit If you don't have enough perch adjustment, you might need a shorter main spring. Hope that helps.

I think it’s going to be put on hold for a few months.

Ahh, diff stuff. Here's one of my original 24mm axles I broke in the racecar... It made a mess. The original axles were mild steel and had been known to break for the car's entire life (it's got a custom floating axle rear end). So I got Howat Engineering to make up a couple of moly axles. These were the same size as the originals. The ends were hardened in an unknown way, but you can see the difference in colour on the splines: Business end: Big end: Funnily enough, I also ended up breaking one of these... It had created small fractures where the splines mesh into the side gears and broke into a psychedelic star shape which is quite interesting to look at. I think all my broken axle ends are still on a shelf in Dad's garage in Palmy. My next step was to get the side gears in the diff taken out the 28mm (same size/spline as an F series Toyota) and then got them electro hardened in Auckland. The current 28mm axles are the same style/manufacturer as the ones pictured above. They've lasted well so far and have taken the abuse, but I'm sure the splines are starting to stretch and wear slightly from my heavy clutch and aggressive left foot (although it doesn't matter at the mo as the car is sitting in the garage... in pieces.) @johnny.race - do you have the ability to make whole axles from scratch like the ones above? Because I might need your services one day.

Haven’t made much progress with this lately, but have bought a couple of bits to help with inspiration. Picked up this spanny, most likely from a YZ125 apparently. Offered it up to the bike and it looks like it’ll work with a bit of fettling. Also found this tank and guard that are a bit more suited to the style I want: might need to shorten the tail of the bike a bit to get the proportions right as the tank is slightly shorter than the original, but I’m happy for now.

In the hearts an minds of boes all over the world / the future of OS is on the internet. Nats will be back (and different), Hanmer doesn’t have to last forever, change isn’t the end of the world . **Edit** just so it’s clear, im all for Hanmer going ahead if people are keen to attend. I won’t have the budget this year, so voted no.

Congratulations on becoming middle aged!

Bump.

Good stuff man! You should really think about installing a 3S if you want the AE86 to go any good.