Amazon: Brake System Upgrade

[dheming]

Took a bunch of pics today, hope you guys don't mind so many. First up is the finished MK2 upper mount. I glued the whole thing together with epoxy this time so that it wouldn't fall apart(used hot glue on the MK1 and it broke apart one day, dropping the coilover straight into the rough floor of course). I used "high build" primer to help fill in some of the imperfections a bit and to make it more snazzy looking:





You can make out the areas where I blended the overhangs of the webs smoothly into the curve of the ring. This is what I was taking about in post #84 that is hard to describe, but easy to see hopefully.



Here's it mounted on the frame with the short coilover installed to show how tight everything is in relation to the spring cup:








So now that I'm moving on to the MK3 setup here's one final pic of all the MK2 stuff together at 3" drop:

[dheming]

Here's the rest of the pics from earlier. I played around quite a bit with different ride heights today, both front and back this time. Here's the rear at 4.5" of drop:


Even at that low I'd still have clearance for some positive travel if I remove this rubber bumper. I don't think I'd like driving around this low but it would be nice to know I could if I ever wanted too. Hence why I'm giving up on the MK2 stuff:





Here's both ends lowered to about max that's reasonably possible, 4.5" rear and 3.5" front. Even at this low the stock front tire can still turn pretty much lock to lock :

[tdz840]

Looks really good.
I presume you plan on a 'kitting list' of supplied components for interested peeps??
One question:
With the suspension at this height (in pics) and with the diff so close to the floor pan what orientation is the prop shaft in? Will this impact on the back end of the prop shaft tunnel and will the orientation be too great for the UJs?
I particulary like the way its a kit of parts although do you plan to cut off the existing fittings and weld on new types?
Cheers
Russ

[Ron Kwas]

Derek;

WOW, those Springseat mounts look sexy to me (can I say that?)...please keep the posts with lots of pix coming...

Cheers and Happy Turkeyday from the right Coast!

[dheming]

Thanks guys. Thanksgiving was awesome BTW. The more I look at it the more I'm enjoying how my wagon looks with it tucking tire sightly now. Last couple days at the shop I've just sat in my chair, stared and thought about what all it would take to run this low. The back I have pretty much figured out, but the front is going to be more complex and involved. One step a time I guess.

As for the prop shaft itself, there is quite a bit of clearance due to the slope of the floor. I'll take a pic to show this next time I'm there. From the pic above it looks to me like the first thing that would contact the floor is the U-joint to axle flange. I'll probably run some stiffish bumpers in place of the stock soft rubber ones, adjusted so contact can't happen. I need to look into the U-joint angle situation next. I'll have to measure what it is and research what maximum is recommended. I imagine they would wear pretty fast at higher deflection angles.

It would be sweet to see more lowered Amazons around the world since it's rarely done to them. To help make that happen I wouldn't mind building a few extras of the custom parts if people are interested in going this route with their Amazon. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it though. For all the rest of the parts I'll be detailing specific brands, parts numbers, etc. Along with tons of pics of course.

[Derek UK]

Lowering to this degree is rarely done on "standard" Amazons because people want to be able to go places in them. Certainly in the UK you'd be scraping the underside of the car all the time and "sleeping policemen"-traffic calming bumps, would make many areas off limits. Even having a flat run into the garage is luxury, modern houses all seem to have a slope you have to climb. Worse in a Wagon if you want to take the family out or go collect a couple gearbox's. Or both!
The rear suspension mods have been an interesting engineering exercise but looking at your spring damper unit it didn't IMO look as if it had enough travel to work. Likely needs at least 4" compression and 2" rebound from static, rebound limited by the straps, with a damper stroke over 6", to make it work reasonably well. Hitting the bump stops all the time isn't very comfortable.
I very much like your fabrication skills and many will covet your workshop access. I don't know if you considered "bagging" the car? Not to make a leaping low rider but to let you tailor the ride height to the driving experience. I think comfort is pretty good too.

[dheming]

Originally Posted by Derek UK

Lowering to this degree is rarely done on "standard" Amazons because people want to be able to go places in them. Certainly in the UK you'd be scraping the underside of the car all the time and "sleeping policemen"-traffic calming bumps, would make many areas off limits. Even having a flat run into the garage is luxury, modern houses all seem to have a slope you have to climb. Worse in a Wagon if you want to take the family out or go collect a couple gearbox's. Or both!

I had a lowered Firebird while I lived in Houston which has some of the worst roads I've seen in America. My Silverado is pretty low but thankfully the roads around here are pretty decent. Lowered looks good but sucks when is comes to ramps/driveways and massive(idiotic) speed bumps, like you say. It's definitely a tradeoff.

Originally Posted by Derek UK

The rear suspension mods have been an interesting engineering exercise but looking at your spring damper unit it didn't IMO look as if it had enough travel to work. Likely needs at least 4" compression and 2" rebound from static, rebound limited by the straps, with a damper stroke over 6", to make it work reasonably well. Hitting the bump stops all the time isn't very comfortable.

This is the first time I've re-engineered a vehicle(I'm learning as I go) so I appreciate your input on this. The MK3 setup will let me run a QA1 Ultra Ride 5855 coilover which has 5.4" of travel and a 14" recommended ride height. This is about the best I can do given the space constraints. My goal is a 3" drop so I designed the new lower mounts with that in mind. I made some cardboard testers today with 4 shock mount holes spaced 1" center to centers, the lowest one is for 3" drop with a 14" shock length and the topmost hole is at stock ride height:

Originally Posted by Derek UK

I very much like your fabrication skills and many will covet your workshop access. I don't know if you considered "bagging" the car? Not to make a leaping low rider but to let you tailor the ride height to the driving experience. I think comfort is pretty good too.

Thank you very much. I go all out when I'm really interested in something. Bagging would be great for easily variable ride height and plush comfort, but it would add quite a bit of complexity with all the plumbing and air system parts. Also I don't think air suspensions are good for performance driving applications, but I could be wrong. Either way it's not something I'd want to deal with in the foreseeable future.

[dheming]

Originally Posted by tdz840

I particulary like the way its a kit of parts although do you plan to cut off the existing fittings and weld on new types?

I forgot to say that I do plan on completely remaking the axle brackets. It's just easier to start over and it will be much cleaner in the end. Also anyone whom wanted to do the coilover conversion (lowered or not) in the wagon would already have to weld some type of bracket on anyways, so it would just be part of the kit.

Speaking of which, it would be nice to have different stages available. Like stage 1 would be the upper mount bar and simple(no multiple holes) axle brackets that would use all stock control arms, the lower one would just be the one from the coupe. This setup would be limited to stock ride height for simplicity and cost effectiveness. Stage 2 would use the same upper mount bar as stage 1, but would have the fully adjustable axle brackets as well as tubular control arms to run spherical joints.

[Burdekin]

Looking good.

[dheming]

Update: I haven't worked on the Amazon since the beginning of December. School has been pretty hectic and I went out of town for half of Christmas break. However today while driving to lunch I finally figured out how I want to do the Mk3 lower mount. Made some drawings while eating then I started making a wood model when I got back to the shop. Unfortunately the panhard bracket was right in the way of where it's going. Since I wanted to redo the panhard mount to work better with the DelSphere joints anyway I decided to cut it off the axle so I can move forward. While I was slicing and grinding I also deleted the little stubs that hold the rubber pad for coupe applications as well as the flange that mounts the shocks. Sorry about the dark pics, I need more light in that part of my shop:






Also before I went out of town I started on a project that I've needed for a long time now. My bench grinder is currently mounted to the base of my drill press since it's the only really solid place I have right now. Needless to say it sucks having to bend down every time I need to grind something so I'm finally doing something about it. A while back I got 9ft of 6-5/8" 1/4" wall steel pipe for $10 and I recently got some 3" 1/4" wall steel pipe for free. For the top plate I bought a 12" x 12" x 1/2" steel plate locally at ALCO and for the bottom I'm going to use one of these. To mount feet on the ends of the tripod legs I cut 3" wide slices from some 4" x 3" angle steel I traded some work for. For feet I'm going to use HD rubber bump stops from a truck. All three tripod legs and the center column will be tightly packed with fine sand to add mass and dampen vibrations from the grinder:







Edit: Forgot to say Happy new year everyone.