I side with Bill on this one. I put rear tube shocks on my first MGB
because I could not afford to buy new levers. I was lucky, I happened into
a set of Bilstein shocks for free that were a good match for the suspension.
I fabricated brackets and the whole deal worked well, except for exhaust
clearance. Since I built my own exhaust, I modified that to clear the
shocks too. Till the first time I hit a speed bump. I got used to the
rattles after a while. Then I gave the car to my wife. The exhaust broke.
It's Wednesday night, and the replacement (out of the box) exhaust won't
clear the shocks. I'm not so enthused about the tube shocks by now.
10 years later. I'm replacing the springs on my vintage race car. The new
springs go on, but now the Spax tube shock will not collapse far enough to
install on the old brackets. 10 o clock at night, and I am modifying
another set of shock mounts with a rat tail file to fit the banjo axle. You
know if I had a good set of stock shock links handy right now.......
The stock rear Armstrong shocks work well when in good condition and
last a long time. A high quality (read expensive) adjustable tube shock
correctly mounted will give you the ability to tailor damping to varying
loads and driving. The down side on the tube conversion is exhaust
clearance (a very important question on an MGC or MGBV8 stock exhaust).
I'm in the same boat as our friend with the MGC. I have a beautyful
Falcon Stainless Steel BV8 exhaust system, but I'll lay odds that clearance
for a tube shock conversion is going to be minimal. I will likely end up
having to use Armstrong levers on my V8.
my 2 np
Kelvin.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WSpohn4@aol.com [mailto:WSpohn4@aol.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 26, 2000 1:17 PM
> To: mgs@autox.team.net
> Subject: Re: MGC shock replacement
>
>
> A further note on this topic, vis a vis the several posts
> that cite what a
> difference it makes when you replace the Armstrongs with tube shocks.
>
> Reminds me of a couple of other car groups. One deals with a
> make of car that
> uses electric cooling fans. Many people there replace their
> old failing units
> with new snazzy Bosch fans and draw the conclusion that the
> factory fitments
> (which were probably barely turning over before being replaced) were
> inherently inferior.
>
> Similarly, another group I frequent often deals with a front
> brake upgrade to
> different callipers from another model. They take their stock
> callipers with
> 100,000 miles (translated from the metric for the ex-colonial
> readership),
> and replace them with new units (which, BTW necessitates a
> master cylinder
> change), and then swear that the factory didn't know what
> they were doing
> putting inadequate brakes on the cars in the first place.
>
> When I, or someone else with more than a pair of ganglia to
> their name, point
> out that if they had just replaced the worn out units with
> new ones, they
> would have had the same improvement, many of them are, how
> shall I put
> this... too damned dense... to see the point.
>
> Same thing with Armstrong shocks. They are actually
> exceptionally good for an
> OE shock - NO other make that I can think of that was fitted
> to new cars in
> that period would go 1/4 as long as a properly maintained
> Armstrong would.
> Some of the 60s Japanese cars had 10,000 mile shocks fitted!
>
> I am not saying that there are no gains in fitting a tube
> shock in place of a
> lever shock - just that most people would neither notice, nor
> care about the
> difference.
>
> It will be the rare driver indeed that really benefits from a
> switch to tube
> shocks, but many more owners will do the conversion, not
> because they need
> to, but for the same reason they do many other add-ons like Mallory
> distributors, negative camber A arms, mag wheels etc. They
> just want to do
> it, for reasons often tied up with image, or the simple
> desire to work on
> their toy and believe that they are accomplishing something.
>
> Many mods are neutral - they don't harm the car's
> performance, but some are
> detrimental. I had one friend that insisted on fitting Ferodo
> DS11 pads to
> his MGB. Many of you may not know what they are. They were a
> very good racing
> compound (I used them for years before switching to a
> carbon/kevlar pad, when
> the asbestos containing DS11 became unavailable for my
> Twincam), but they
> were a racing pad that needed to be warm before they worked.
> I regularly
> swung the ass of my car off the end of the first hairpin turn
> at the start of
> a race; the next lap, all was well and the pads had reached operating
> temperature.
>
> I told my intransigent friend that if I were the lawyer
> opposing him in an
> accident case, and could show that he had intentionally
> _reduced_ the cold
> performance of his brakes, and that had any relevance to the
> accident, he
> would be toast. I never did hear from him as to whether the
> brakes had caused
> him grief, but another guy I knew rolled his 240 Z (that's
> zed, not 'zee',
> you American linguistic savages!) on the first turn coming
> down from a ski
> hill for exactly that reason.
>
> Anyway, as I started out saying, I rather like Armstrongs....
>
> Bill S.
>
|