Did it lean to the left or the right? I recall a discussion a while ago
that sort of concluded that the UK cars lean to the right and the LHD
cars lean to the left. This would certainly point to the driver's
weight as the culprit here. There was a suggestion that all the UK
drivers send their springs to the US for exchange with the left leaning
ones over here!
Cheers,
Joe
P.S. For the purposes of this discussion (rear suspension) I have
excluded anything about the front. While adjusting the front will
indeed compensate, the real problem is the rear spring.
-----Original Message-----
From: Gosling, Richard B [mailto:Richard.Gosling@atkinsglobal.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 9:21 AM
To: 'Joe Curry'; 'Zahid Ahsanullah'; 'Spitfires'
Subject: RE: Driver side lean
..."all the weight of each side is supported by that single leaf"...
Surely all the weight of each side is also taken by the front springs
and by
the sway-bar at the front. Unless the chassis is actually twisting, the
front of the car must lean exactly as much as the rear of the car - and
the
front suspension set-up is much stiffer against leaning than the single
lower leaf of the rear swing-spring. Therefore, for the car to develop
a
permanent lean, the front must have collapsed as much as the lower leaf
of
the rear spring.
As an experiment, I once disconnected one end of the sway-bar on Daffy
while
she sat on level ground. The sway-bar neither sprung up or down when
released from the A-arm - indicating that the sway-bar was neither
making
any attempt to correct the lean (as an unyielded bar should do), nor was
it
forcing the lean to be worse while fighting against the other springs.
BTW, with respect to Andy Mace's observations - Daffy was a 1978 UK
1500,
and she definitely leaned! And I've seen it in other UK cars too...
Richard Gosling
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