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Old 09-29-2013, 11:56 AM
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x-bird x-bird is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2011
Location: Penciltucky
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you'll be plenty fine with 55 degrees. i'm pretty sure mine started with around 27 degrees--bare heim--and i probably got them to about 35/40 degrees with the spacers for it to work and there is a lot of angularity in mine at full lock.

pros and cons as always to some of the things you want to do/change. short "tight" steering arm = small amount of turn needed at the wheel, but harsher kickback. longer = more turn needed at the wheel, but better "fine" control and "shorter" kickback from the same hits.

Ackerman --- always a matter of debate as to how much, if any and whether positive or negative. ackerman didn't factor in contact patch distortion, outside wheel loading and scrub--his ideas and theory came during the tall wheel wood spoke days with low speeds. Based on a false premise in some ways when applied to modern vehicles. Too many jump on the "gotta have positive ackerman" bandwagon without really looking at their architecture and geometry. Front steer can make it difficult to achieve positive. I run negative, set it that way, and like it that way. Positive and my ride will barely corner above 5 mph. I tacked on mount after mount on my steering arms to figure out which way worked best.

if you have no choice, it's better imho, to have non-parallel tie rods in the vertical plane in comparison to the horizontal in relation to the a-arms. The parallelism in vertical is only "temporary" Once the suspension begins to travel and the rods move during cornering it will go out of parallel, so the method i shoot for is parallel at loaded ride height or a little into the travel.

in horizontal, it only loses parallel during cornering and the amount relates to the steering arm's horizontal arc.

Sometimes you have to mentally project things to the extreme to see which way to go. Especially if you don't have software to play with. imagine a rack 3 feet out in front with a tie rod going way back on an angle to the arm. the arm junction will be highly susceptible to dumping any impact force into the juncture and folding inward and not transmit up the tie rod. go extreme enough with the angle and you could see that the spindle could rotate and barely affect the rack at all. instead the tie rod would move more front to back rather than in and out.
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