Suspension Blueprinting?

Ricisan here, another refugee from CF that wandered in. lol
I've noticed some Vettes w/heim joints in their suspension. Is this just for bling and bragging rights, or does it take out the slack in the stk suspension components? I could see this going either way.
My 74 is nothing special right now. VB&P smart struts, Bilsteins,f/r bars, spreader bar,HB and 100# off front end. I'm upgrading as I go, trying to be like BJ.
No $ for bling, just looking for biggest bang for the buck! TIA

R

Welcome to the motley crew of the Flying Dutchmen....


going to follow the replies to your questions, myself....

:flash:

Actually it's a sort of compromised solution. It's best suited for race cars, the rod ends wear out faster than a normal bushing on a street car, however to get the desired misalignment angles it's either that or johnny joints, rubber deflects, poly is not an option for these locations.

Spohn has an even nicer solution than the johnny joints now:
http://www.spohn.net/shop/Del-Sphere-Pivot-Joints/

These are rebuildable, preload adjustable and expensive LOL. 3/4 iis not too large if you buy a reducer sleeve and tap it into the bushing eye, the stock size is 5/8" on the hub. You'll need a custom center bracket as the stock one uses cam bolts )what are they, 3/8 bolts? I always forget, pretty small)

There's a lot of BS parts out there, one is the camber limiting smart strut system. it severely reduces camber gain on the rear, it's not a drag car is it? Although the stock camber curve is a bit optimistic (the C2 piece is even worse, you should see the early bracket, it's ridiculous) the bp stuff relocates the pivots to where the lower strut and halfshaft are parallel. The only camber gain left is from the halfshaft being shorter than the lower strut rod. Does your car have 335 sized tires, a lowered CG and a raised roll center and super stiff bars to reduce body roll from lateral weight displacement and do the meats hook up with that little amount of body roll or do you loose slip angle or even lift the inner wheel....

Bigger is not always better.

As the rear wheel trailing arm and the rear axle spindle moves up and down, the end of the stock strut rod and the end of the vbp smart struts, experience a rotational torque. With the stock all cast iron strut rod, this in itself is not a problem. Being a solid rod, the slight rotational motion is taken up in the bushing deflection. In the vbp smart struts, the end of the rod is screwed into the strut rod and held in place with a lock nut. The rotational torque can cause the lock nut to work loose. This has happened to some people. To prevent this you hear of people really torqueing the nut up and also using lock tight.

With a heim joint attaching to the spindle fork, the heim joint easily just rotates slightly to avoid a torque developing that could cause it's lock nut to loosen.

Also, take the strut rod bracket, that attaches to the differential. Hold up a vbp bracket and a stock bracket. Place the flat surfaces together so they touch. Notice that the VBP bolt attachment holes (there's four of them) are bigger in diameter than the stock. Kenny, at Tom's Differential, thought that this small extra tolerance could allow the vbp bracket to shift sideways during a hard dragstrip launch and precipitate a failure. Don't know if Kenny was making a reasonable hypothesis. We can't ask Kenny since he died of a heart attack September 08 (only aged 55). Kenny claimed that in his experience drag racing Corvettes, he had destroyed, at one time or another, every part in the C3 rear suspension/diff, etc.

Kenny had a reason to favor the stock bracket. He used it in the Tom's Differential heim jointed strut rod assembly. To maintain the strut rods parallel to the axle, he sawed of the ends of the strock bracket and welded them back an inch lower. You can get this effect with the stock bracket by putting a thick 1" aluminum plate between the bracket and diff. (This was a suggestion of another forum reader.)