Learning, learning, learning.......

[Three Peaks]

Scratch building seems to be a whole bunch of little steps learning along the way. I should be a real expert by time I finish this car!

I was fooling around with the suspension the other day and realized something I had missed. Since I am attempting to use the Ford 8.8 IRS rear for an original style frame I have had to make some real adjustments. While cycling the suspension the other day to see if my trunk aluminum would clear the upper control arms, I noticed that the face of the spindle was in a pretty lousy position for wheel positioning. In other words, my weak attempt at putting together a suspension to fit this unit gave me really horrible geometry in the rear. Don't ask me why I didn't notice it sooner....
The pictures of the suspension at level and at full droop are in my gallery to look at.
The next 2 pictures are the cardboard cutouts I used to test for new mounting locations to bring the suspension geometry somewhat into line. Yes, it looks like a kid colored them with crayon. I'll have you know those are magic markers and I did it for contrast so the different pieces would be visible.
The large black circle is the frame tube looking from the back and the small round circle in the tube is where the original pick up point would be located. You can see I need to make some new pick up points approximately 4 1/2" above the original points to make the geometry somewhat close to what I need.

I would appreciate any input before I start rebuilding all these pieces (again). Will this travel give me proper geometry or should I build in more camber or caster by adjusting my pick up points? Is there a book I could pick up that would teach me something about designing suspensions and what is the proper travel/geometry to design into these IRS rears?

Thanks,
Bob
After looking at it for awhile and scratching my head for awhile, I decided to mock up some pieces in cardboard to see if I could redesign the pieces and find out where I needed to adjust my suspension pick up points for the proper geometry. After mocking it up, I think I found what I need and now all I have to do is tear the lower suspension arms apart and completely rebuild them.