Lowering leaf springs
Mattax thanks for the info got some reading to do.
I live in New England so the roads here are pretty beat up, so I'll be looking into a little softer setup.
If I go with poly setup I need to keep them lubricated?
But stock rubber should work fine for me?
Any brands recommended for ball joints ,tie rods and shocks?
Why no adjustable strut rods?
Torque bars 1" or under?
Sorry for all the questions new to this forum stuff. Just trying not to waste money on buying the wrong parts. Thanks
Proforged is currently making good quality bushings, ball joints, and tie rod ends. Moog is not, their stuff has been trash for a few years now.
I think rubber bushings for your application should be fine, especially with the amount of stock parts you're retaining. Like Mattax I run poly and delrin on my car, but, poly and delrin have additional requirements for upgrading components.
With rubber bushings you can still use the standard strut rods, they'll work the same as factory. If you use Poly or Delrin bushings at the LCA, adjustable strut rods are needed because the length of the stock strut rods depends on the big rubber bushings.
I wouldn't bother with anything under 1" for a torsion bar, but that's just me. PST's 1.03" bars are a good all around bar if used with good shocks like the Bilstein RCD's.
KYB's are garbage.
Because they're not supposed to be adjustable. It creates the final leg of the triangle fixing the lower control arm position. All the caster and camber adustment is done in the upper control arm.
The main reason Firm Feel came up with them was to let builders compensate as needed. A big reason for compensation was 'one size fits most' polyurethane strut bushings. These were particulaly a problem when the car also had polyurethane lower control arm bushings. Here's anotehr way to fix the issue
Making A-Body Strut rod Bushings Work
The reason for adjustable strut rods really doesn't have anything to do with using them to adjust caster or camber. Having adjustable strut rods allows you to tune the length of the strut rod so that there is no binding or resistance from the strut rod as the LCA moves through it's full range of travel. Even on factory cars they likely wouldn't all be identically the same length if you actually checked the LCA's range of travel for resistance/binding, but they only had to be close enough to meet the alignment specs off the production line.
But the length of the strut rod becomes more critical as you stiffen up the suspension and bushings. Poly doesn't have as much give or flex, so the geometry of the suspension has to be more accurate.
The factory got away with non-adjustable strut rods because they used giant rubber bushings on them. That lessened the penalty for having them not be exactly the right length, but it also allows the LCA to move around more. If you keep all the rubber bushings the non-adjustable strut rods work, but, if you start getting rid of the rubber bushings for poly, or especially Delrin, the length of the strut rod will need to be different than factory, I promise you. Not to adjust the caster/camber, but to provide an LCA that moves free of binding.
