Front End Unsprung Weight

myduster360 said

Shoot for a Front roll couple in the 80-85% of the total Roll rate and it should wind up with a decent neutral handling starting point.

Avoid lowering the front end too much with stock Knuckles. You lose a heap ton of jounce travel and can easily bottom out the LCA on the frame.

If you ever get the Caster curves modeled/plotted out, take out most of the anti-dive and see the good it does. A couple years ago, i was playing around with a new suspension design using a 73 B-Body LCA hooked to either Mustang 2 or Corvette Knuckle. Most of pf that effort was a fail but ditching much of the Anti-Dive was the one bright spots. I plan to test near 0 Anti Dive on my Dart Swinger once its on the road.

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You can lower these cars significantly with the stock spindles as long as you 1- increase the wheel rate to compensate for the lost travel and 2- swap out the tall factory lower bump stops to add some travel back in. These cars left the factory with 100 lb/in wheel rates, you can easily double the rate and still not have too much. That nearly halves the needed travel. The 1.03” bars from PST that are pretty popular have a 230 lb/in rate, and they’re not even that crazy. I run a 300 lb/in rate on my Duster, and it’s my daily driver not some track only car.

As far as the anti-dive goes, that’s a much larger problem on the B/E body cars than it is on the A-bodies. The B/E body platform had to support large station wagons, and as a result they have a ton more anti-dive built in. Hotchkis moved the front UCA mount on their B/E body UCA’s for exactly that reason. They could have done the same with their A-body UCA’s and didn’t, it’s not really much of an issue on the A’s.