Damn good points - thank you!

Cheers,

Charlie

 

Kudos to Gary King and the Mini of Peabody team, not to overlook the folks tucked out back at the Car Spa.

The shocks and bar are installed, with an initial alignment that provides -0.6 degrees of camber at all four corners.

Front shocks are at 50% (1 full turn off of soft) and rear shocks are at 30% (two thirds turn off of soft). The bar is set at the softest setting.

Regrettably with the temperature hovering around 10-15 degrees and the test area far from clean, there is no possibility of gathering any data or refining this baseline. All in due time I suppose.

Hopefully the B-Spec exhaust will become available by 1 March, and of course the last piece of the puzzle (Kosei/Hoosier) can also wait for a while.

I am mostly delighted that the extensive tampering with the suspension has not introduced even the tiniest squeak or rattle - that is a very good thing!

Cheers,

Charlie

 

You could at least tell us how it feels while driving your early morning run.

BTW it is 3 deg here this morning

 

LOL - it feels FIRM, I'll say that. Koni yellows at 10 degrees - need I say more?

And if I bent the car into a corner with any verve I'm afraid the tires might shatter!

Mercy it is hard to have patience some times - I go to sleep dreaming of the gentle aroma of a hot Hoosier...

Cheers,

Charlie

Ps: Anyone posting to this thread right now from Hawaii will seriously hurt my feelings!!!

 

I'm sitting on my parts pile waiting for the weather to warm up. The idea of runflats with Koni Yellows and Swifts springs hurts just thinking about it. Had our local KCRSCCA banquet and that just got the fever going hotter now...

 

My sympathies!

Given that there's no fool like an old fool I did establish today that the car now has all three of the desired handling characteristics:

1. throttle open -> understeer
2. throttle feathered -> neutral
3. throttle closed -> oversteer...

So I am at least in the right ballpark.

But one thing is for damned sure, and that is that no-one will be drinking coffee in this car unless they have a cover on the cup! This ain't no limo...

Cheers,

Charlie

 

Nice, just what you need.

Now the question is, can the old dog learn how to do all three in a well balanced 3 step dance through the cones and achieve the desired result...

It seems that I am good with steps 1 and 2, but when I get to 3, my feet get tangled and I loop the car. Got to love the things you can get away with on an autox course.

 

BTW - I went for a drive today - 5 deg - and even the snow tires felt hard

 

LOL - Amen to all that!

Cheers,

Charlie

 

Charlie,
Can you post your alignment spec print-out? (Toe F&R?) I'd like to take it in to my shop. Will spec need to change for different wheel sizes?

Have you checked the position of the holes that the front pins went in? Last year I had my car weighted for 180lbs in the driver's seat and the holes on the top of the strut perch were NOT both all the way "IN" as is directed by those doing the DIY camber adjustment. One of mine looks IN while the other is pushed OUT a bit. I got -.6 degrees camber on both sides.

I often wish I had purchased a Cooper now that I'm hooked on Autocross. I'm posting here because this is the only active thread, I've enjoyed following it and it seems relevant in many ways. To orient you (and others) to where I am coming from. I'm running D stock in a local street tire division. I won the OR region title last year due to a series of VERY fortunate events. My goal is to defend that title.

I have 30 degrees on some of you. Finally above freezing... 39! But the rain is back.

 

Left Front
Camber -0.7, Caster 2.9, Toe 0.12

Right Front
Camber -0.7, Caster 2.8, Toe 0.07

Left Rear
Camber -0.6, Toe .05

Right Rear
Camber -0.7, Toe .4

The alignment machine is pretty sensitive, and with all measurements to the right of the decimal point a sneeze will change a reading a tenth.

The general idea is that I also have about -.6 and a hair up front with the pins pulled, and I also asked specifically that the camber on the rear be substantially reduced from the OEM range of -1.4 to -2.1 degrees.

Mind you I have NOT TESTED so this could be way too exciting once the Hoosiers go on and the car starts to hit maximum roll. We shall see.

But I do expect the car to start out far more neutral than the STX setup, where I had 12 more pounds in the rear tires to help balance the handling.

Cheers,

Charlie

Ps: that RR toe number looks a wee bit suspicious now doesn't it...

 

Let's hope it wrong.

 

I figured that you just had a typo on the RR and left out a zero. I assume that the toe figures are in degrees, right? And that a positive angle is toe in? I'm still used to toe in linear dimensions (1/8" in, 2 mm in).

BTW, its freaking me out a little that the OP has Gollum as a name, and now Mini2NA chimes in with Frodo. Is Gandolf the 1971 Cooper S with 15 national titles?

Mike

 

Yep, the toe figures are in degrees, and yep I too have no easy conversion from mm or eights to fractions of a degree.

I reckon I'll run that by my friend with the machine when next we speak, and take his opinion on it.

Might be worth tweaking, but it is certainly not a major issue. It is however well outside the .13 to .27 specification for rear toe. It also throws out the thrust angle for the back end which should be between -.17 and +.17, as it creates an angle of -.26. So the car is crabbing a little bit which under the circumstances is probably worth addressing.

And do please tell me more about Gandalf, as that is news to me, and pretty amusing.

Cheers,

Charlie

 

Gollum and Frodo are characters from the Lord of the Rings, and Gandalf was the wise old wizard. I figured that the two characters with modern MINIs would have some old wise Mini to get inspiration from. I made up the image that I thought would fit, always appreciated the vintage Minis.

The toe is correctible, I would take it back and have them do it right. That is far enough out of range that the car would feel different turning left than right.


Doing some math, 1 degree of toe would be about 3/8 inch of toe on that one side. So having .4 degrees is a little more than 1/8" of toe on that one wheel.

Mike

 

Indeed.

From my memory, where my father stored it by reading the Fellowship to me when I was just a young'un...

"One ring to seek them all
One ring to find them
One ring to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them
In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie".

I read that to my son also at about the same age.

Hence Gollum as the name of the R53, which had the same split personality as its namesake - part good, and part evil.

This second incarnation has more Smeagol...

Kind regards,

Charlie

 

And Frodo is the Ring Bearer. Small yet mighty.... and he triumphs in the end. Hope I didn't ruin the ending for you (the books or the 2013 SCCA OR Region Street Tire results ).

 

Yes massterrr....



And it is NOW time for the Rolex - which to me means I have survived another winter, and now that the calendar is set for 2013 I am really looking forward. I intend to do the standard National Tour in Delaware this year (never been there before) as well as the new Match Tour up at Devens here in my back yard. Lincoln also - and there to show improvement from my original trip campaigning the Works car.

It is about ten weeks to the Bay State Corvette Club's event - the first of the new year, and a test & tune for me - and then straight into the Regional season with the first points event the following weekend.

But back to Daytona and vicarious living for now...

 

What bumpstops did you use with your Koni's?

 

Charlie, something else has come to mind with your build, that is the rear suspension attachment point to the shocks. Are you aware of the issues that you can have if you drop the shock out too many times, say, to change the settings? There is a pretty good thread on this subject that you should be aware of...
https://www.northamericanmotoring.co...rs-beware.html

 

Mini2na the answer is stock as far as I know. I just went and checked the Koni boxes, and all that is there for the rear is the OEM dampers, nothing else. It's a good question because 13.5.D sets limits on change for that part.

Eddie thanks VERY much for that link - it's vital information!

Kind regards,

CHarlie

 

I have wondered if MINI torque requirements are at the limits of the material. Too many ins and outs and the threads wear out. When I changed my shocks on my '07 I torqued them to a lower value and checked them periodically. Not sure I would recommend that but that is what I did. But, I also never had any problems with it.

I am guessing a little bit here, but I think the problem is that when the threads wear they won't hold the torque. Without the preload that the torque provides, the bolt is free to bend with each up and down of the wheel. That leads to fatigue of the bolt and to bolt failure. This seems to have been what happened to my friend and his MINI although we will never know for sure.

Given the lack of post about this problem, it seems that with a single change of the shocks, as you have done, you shouldn't have any problems, although I would check the bolts periodically. However, if you find you will be needing to make shock adjustments through the season, you might want to consider making an access port to the the top of the shock so you don't have to drop the shock to get to the adjuster. If I remember the rules correctly, this is allowed in the stock class.

 

Yep, it is. But you may perhaps have over estimated my sophistication...

I'd be mighty surprised of the rear shocks get adjusted even once.

Smarter folks than I could no doubt achieve advantage back there, but I know my limitations and there are two reasons why I didn't make the adjusters accessible...

1. with the weight up front, the transient behavior on the back-end (as long as it is not over damped) matters relatively little I suspect - little enough so that...
2. if I were to set up a test course, run three runs on progressively harder settings, and analyze the results I'm pretty sure any effect would be obscured by driver noise!

You have just offered a damned good reason to leave them where they are - so that is #3...

I do intend to test the rear bar settings once I get the good street tires on, just to explore the balance when I stiffen a bit from the current softest setting. Here again, I doubt this would be decision I'd change course by course once I arrive at an opinion.

If I can fix some variables, and get the car to rotate the right amount, then I am accustomed to tuning with tire pressures. I just need a sensible starting point.

I figger if I am fussing too much with settings in Stock class, rather than paying close attention to my driving, I am probably missing the most important factor in going fast.

Mebbe I'm lazy, but it does mean that the important issue about the fasteners that you've pointed out to me probably won't bite too hard in my case.

Cheers,

Charlie

 

Maybe I was, but that was being overly cautious on my part.
But then again, you are about 10 steps more into this than I am
You'll be fine ... Just want you to be aware.

Now, back to having fun.

 

My read of the rules says that we can't have access holes for adjusting. Only holes to pass through a remote reservoir. In fact, I have heard that it was posed how about I make a hole for the reservoir and then replace those shocks with Koni S/As. How about that? The answer is, "Then the hole should be repaired per factory specs."

How are you getting that little camber on the rear? I had an alignment the other day and they only got about -1.4 in the rear. (car is an 09).

Bob