K-Member / Rack & Pinion Steering Suggestions
Round tube, heim joints, k frame supports shocks without bracing. Nicer a arms. On a all steel street car no problems. Just throwing it out there
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Thanks for posting that!
I do prefer round tube to square, although with proper engineering it shouldn't really matter. I would actually argue against heims on the street. I've run them at the UCA, and they do not live long enough in that application to be practical in my opinion. 7-10k miles is the best I've done with them there, which is more frequently than I want to replace them. Much prefer Delrin bushings at the UCA.
They have the mount for the coil over off of the K frame, so, advantage being you don't have to mount the coil-over to the upper shock mount that wasn't designed to carry the weight of the car. Downside as Denny addressed is the shorter coil over. Pros and cons like anything. It looks like you have a tubular support installed for your shock tower, was that part of the Gerst?
Thanks again for posting the pictures!
Ok , so here's my 2c worth.
In the above photo, I can see that the inner part of the forward k frame mount is not welded. The shock mount looks to be made from multiple pieces. And my biggest reason, hopefully corrected by now, was that QA-1 is a new company formed when Cap Auto bit the dust. No way in hell would I ever buy anything that was made by Cap Auto. I saw first hand their quality. I know a lot of members use QA-1 now so they must have improved their quality.
HDK or RMS for me .
Better get your facts straight. QA1 was not formed when CAP "bit the dust". The bought out CAP for their designs to get into the Mopar aftermarket. QA1 itself has been around since 1993, which I believe means that as a company they've been around longer than RMS, not sure about HDK. Obviously they're going to be "new" to the coil over conversion, but they've been offering their torsion bar K member and parts for quite some time now. And they've been doing suspension for other makes/models longer.
CAP actually had pretty good designs, they were just a small shop and the the guy doing their welding was an amateur. I ran CAP parts on my Challenger actually. I never had an issue with the CAP UCA's, although some did and there were documented failures. I did have a weld on one of their LCA's crack, which was when I pulled all the welded CAP products off my Challenger. I still run the adjustable strut rods, and have a full 70k+ miles on those. Again, this is pretty much exactly the design QA1 still uses. CAP's issue was fabrication, not design, although QA1 definitely made a lot of improvements on the CAP K member. The LCA's were almost unchanged, and the strut rods were unchanged. The UCA's were completely redesigned and look nothing like what CAP was selling.
I actually hadn't realized that Gerst was bought out by QA1, but that makes sense with the new QA1 coil over front end. Like with the CAP products I'm sure they made some improvements. They seem to have a fairly regular practice of buying out smaller manufacturers to expand their product line.
Well they are all really just ford front ends and clearly unsafe.
Yeah, no need to go there. No one said they were unsafe, not even me. I just like to look at what the actual advantages are, what the REAL benefits are, not just "they're nicer". What the performance advantages are. And the coil over conversions do have advantages, they're really the only way to run a rack and pinion on these cars. I don't believe a rack and pinion is necessary myself, but that's just my opinion.
