Hmmm, sorry to have got you riled up. But since the conversion kits (or at
least the one I have) use the EXACT SAME MOUNTING POINTS and apply the
stresses to the exact same section of the unibody and subframe, I have to
say I entirely fail to see your point. "Shock towers" are a feature of some
designs, it's true, but their presence or absence seems irrelevant here,
considering MGCs had front tube shocks from the factory.
--
Max Heim
'66 MGB GHN3L76149
If you're near Mountain View, CA,
it's the primer red one with chrome wires
on 9/7/05 4:59 AM, S. Allen at scottallen3663@gmail.com wrote:
> "...wasn't engineered for it" is a pretty vague reason... I mean, most MGs
> weren't engineered for radial tires, either, but that doesn't stop folks
> from fitting them, and for good reasons.
> I thought it would be obvious that there's a difference between
> improvements to tire technology and making a structural change that the
> vehicle was never designed for. I mean, if you want to nit-pick it wasn't
> designed for an electronic fuel pump either, or halogen lights, or
> intermittent wipers, but a thinking person would recognize that there's a
> difference between upgrading an existing component to take advantage of
> current design and technology and swapping something out that fundamentally
> changes how the car was designed.
> How 'bout I don't be vague? They did not engineer the vehicle structurally
> to support tube shocks. This is particularly important on a unibody or
> monocoque design vehicle where load and stress from road vibration must be
> dampened across the entire structure.
> Any advantage in ride must be weighed against the long term structural
> impacts. There are no shock towers or hard points to mount the shocks on and
> as such, in the long term you can expect to see the effect of it in the
> body's stress points, like where the dog leg meets the rocker as well as the
> mount points for the shocks, (seen both).
> There are a few things that you can do to mitigate it. Performance sway
> bars and a chassis stiffener for instance, but by that point you have
> travelled for afield from the original intent of just "upgrading" to tube
> shocks and you'll need to make other modifications to compensate for the
> change in ride.
> Or you could just slap them on, pretend they ride the same, and twenty
> years from now a stranger will curse your name when a restoration shop tells
> him that the structural cracks in the body can't be safely repaired.
> ~Scott Allen
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