Yes it was Ehrenberg, it was in the latest issue. He states removes compliance from suspension, shock values go to infinity?? Moves the pivot point 1.5- 2"?? Heim joint do not last on the street,even with covers. I was going to try the Firm Feel ones,as they do not have joints, but are adjustable in length. On the other hand I found the QA1 rods For $213.00 online ,they look like excellent pieces.
Yeah it figures. He says those things, but does he provide suspension geometry numbers? Does he actually show that moving the pivot point causes some kind of issue? Because I've used adjustable strut rods with heims on all of my cars, and have yet to get into an issue with setting them up. I get no binding at all through the entire range of motion I have with my LCA's, which is better than what you can do with the stock bushing strut rods. Now, my cars are lowered and run large torsion bars, so, the LCA travel range is different than stock. But they're adjustable strut rods for a reason. Shock values to infinity? That doesn't even make sense. The strut rods are along for the ride with up/down travel. They locate the LCA fore/aft, and there's no shock absorber in that direction. Nor is it the primary direction of motion. Sure, the stock bushings probably absorb some road noise, but they also allow the LCA to move around, which isn't what you want.
He did the same thing in his "disk-o-tech" article with the FMJ spindles. "Oh, they're taller, they mess everything up, the geometry is terrible, they'll over-angle the ball joints, blah, blah blah". Mopar Muscle did an article later that tracked the bump steer and suspension geometry numbers for the FMH spindles vs the 73-76 A-body spindles and found that pretty much everything Ehrenberg said was BS. Yes, there were some small changes in geometry, but in certain applications the changes were actually an
improvement. So, Ehrenberg pulled all the BS about the FMJ spindles completely out of his *** and didn't ever actually do any testing to show why/how it could be a problem.
The QA1 strut rods are pretty much exactly what I ran on my Challenger. Mine were made by CAP before Qa1 bought them out, but they're the same parts, aluminum construction for the blocks and tubes. When my Challenger gets back on the road they'll be on it, don't even need to change out the heims. They did somewhere over 60k miles, without covers/boots, with year round, daily driver use. Like vitamindart said I would occasionally wipe them down and hit them with some dry graphite lube, but that's it. And now they make boots that will work for that application, so, you could hit them with dry lube and put covers on them and probably never have to worry about them again. Most people would probably never put 60k+ all weather miles on their Mopar anyway.
I do agree somewhat on using heims on street cars, there are some applications where they should not be used. I ran Hotchkis UCA's on my Challenger as well, which have heim joints. The first set of heims in the Hotchkis UCA's only lasted 7k miles. Hotchkis replaced them for me at no charge and sent me the boots that had become available (great customer service!), and I ran another 7k miles onto them. They're not completely toast yet, but I bet they'd only go a few thousand more miles before I have to replace them again. They'll get new heims and boots before the car goes back on the road. So yeah, at the UCA I don't recommend heims, they don't last well on a daily. But at the strut rod, no issues. There's a lot less load on the heim at the strut rod.
***Edit***
And yes, I drove my Challenger everywhere, and used it for darn near everything. Those adjustable strut rods with heims were on the car for everything...
