Fabricated A-Body spindle ideas and discussion
@72bluNblu, you have enough time doing research on these things, what are your thoughts on spindle changes to actually improve geometry?
Honestly from my end I haven’t spent a ton of time looking into spindle improvements. I’ve looked into enough suspension geometry to recognize some of the shortcomings of the factory parts and the MII set ups, but awareness of that is still a ways from new designs.
It really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish and how much custom work you really want to do. If you use the factory mounting points, for example, it ultimately limits what you can do from a geometry standpoint even if you start from a blank page with the spindles.
I think with the factory points it’s pretty well shown that a slightly taller spindle is a benefit for the roll center and camber gain. More SAI would help some things but that’s a trade off. Even the camber gain is car set up dependent, the goal is just to counter the body roll so there’s definitely a point where more isn’t better.
Having a lower ball joint that separates the steering arm out is super handy and allows for more adjustment to tune geometry, not to mention better quality ball joints. I know there are benefits to flipping the ball joint, but I don’t honestly know if that’s a good option if you’re retaining the rest of the factory mounting points.
I think you actually get to a point of diminishing returns fairly quickly. Using the factory points and spindles if you lower the car, run adjustable control arms and a slightly taller ball joint you actually get pretty decent geometry. Sure there’s more improvements out there, but unless you’re being super competitive with what you’re doing with the car the drivers skill level becomes more important really quickly.
I think a lot of the improvements from changing the spindles out aren’t strictly geometry based. Like Dion mentioned the ability to have ABS, or certain brake, steering or sensor packages is probably a larger benefit than pure geometry improvements. To me there’s really only a few people that have really tuned the suspension with the factory spindles to a point where they’ve gotten everything they can get out of them.
I honestly think for me what I want is achievable with the FMJ spindles I’m running. I’m not particularly interested in adding ABS to my cars, I like the Viper brakes I’m running, and until I map out and tune what I’ve got I don’t know that getting into custom spindles is really a rabbit hole I need to go down. Which is not at all to say it’s not a worthwhile project, just like a lot of things it’s probably not a direction I’m headed in myself.