F1Fan

Good quality adjustable dampers are the foundation of any high performance, high quality suspension system. There is no way around this fact and is actually the reason you feel the car should handle better. You made a mistake and bought inexpensive low quality non-adjustable dampers. Replace the poor dampers and many of your cars handling issues will go away.

If you want to maximize your car's handling, ride and quiet read my post throughly again. I've outlined all you need to do to have a better than decent suspension on your S197 V6 that actually works and is quiet. There is NO cheaper way to do this and get results this good. If you cannot afford to get a high quality set of dampers just save your money until you can. DO NOT waste your hard earned money on intermediate steps and temporary use parts. You already do not have enough money to do the job right so why waste limited resources on stuff that you don't need and doesn't help achieve your suspension goals?

It is just as easy going on line to buy FRPP GT500 strut mounts, GT500 front control arms and GT500 LCAs as any other S197 suspension part. These just work better for your application and use given your stated goals.

The GT500 strut mounts, front control arms and LCAs are all the quietest highest quality parts on the market and being OEM they are very inexpensive. Do not under estimate the value of the millions of dollars that Ford spent on developing these suspension parts for your car. Companies like Hot Parts/J&M and UMI spend just about zero money developing suspension parts and even less on durability and NVH testing. I suggest that you avoid them like the plague.

Why to you think you need to use any poly bushings? You posted that you did not want to make your car any louder or rougher riding. The fact is that all poly bushed LCAs and UCAs increase noise in the cabin and there is no way around this. The less poly you use the smoother and quieter your car will be. The Ford GT500 parts do not use poly bushings instead they use a much firmer rubber bushing than the stock V6 parts to improve control of the suspension without adding the noise and shorter lifespan of a poly bushings.

Oh by the way, did you know that poly bushing need to be lubricated and replaced much more often than rubber bushings? Poly bushings deform by a process known as "cold flow" and quickly loose their as poured shape. This causes bushing noises and once started can make the car handle very unpredictably and even worse can lead to suspension failure due to the large play in the suspension. These are not so much bushing failures as a failure on the part of the drivers/owners to recognize these changes in handling and the need to replace their poly bushings with new parts.

Nobody really talks about this problem because they blame the sellers and makers of the bushings for making defective parts. The truth is that poly is an excellent bushing material for one kind of use, on axis support of the bushing sleeve with little or no off axis flex required. But poly is a terrible bushing material for any joint that needs to have some flexibility and is stressed off axis of the bushing sleeve. Using an inappropriate material for bushings is the real problem here. Sure you can get away with using poly bushings this way on a race car but they see very few miles and are usually inspected and replaced religiously.

Most folks install their poly bushed LCAs and forget about them thinking they are just as durable as a stock rubber bushing but nothing would be further from the truth. Many people after driving on their new poly bushings 10-15K miles feel their car's handling is "off" but cannot figure out where the problem is because everything looks OK when they stick their head under the car for 5 seconds. Nobody (well not nobody I guess because I do it this way) actually maintains their cars correctly by disassembling, inspecting, replacing (if they show any distortion) and lubing which is required if you hope to keep the handling 100% right and squeak free.

Do some research on poly bushing material and you will see that this is not B.S. So tell me, why do you think you want poly bushings again?

Why do you think you need LCA relocation brackets, are you a drag racer? LCA relocation brackets are a very useful suspension tuning tuning tool but you don't have the basics yet. Save your money and get your core suspension FIRST. I cannot express how important this is to you and your car's happiness.

Go and carefully read the sticky thread titled "Lower your 05/06 Mustang GT" it has at least two boat loads of good information directly on point. Read it carefully and it will answer all of your questions and save you a lot of unhappiness with your car. I posted all of this stuff at least three or four years ago and it is still accurate except that Koni finally came to market with the always excellent Koni Sport dampers, Steeda finally released the LCA relocation brackets with LOTS of adjustment locations I was begging them to sell and there are excellent quality Watt's links available from Saleen and Griggs.

I implore you to read and think before just jumping into the cheap stuff that you will be sorry you bought.

If you have any questions please post them here in your thread and I"ll be happy to try to answer them!

Cheers!

F1Fan

Rubrignitz,

The UMI and Spohn joints are very similar in design and both have the same flaws. The primary problem of these spherical joints for a street car is the use of Delrin bushing material and the somewhat more limited range of motion they have.

Delrin has almost zero isolation quality when compared with poly bushing material. This is why they use a screw-in retainer for the Delrin bushings, they need to be adjusted as they age and because they have no "give" or isolation traits. The whole idea behind the Currie Johnny Joint design was isolation, range of motion, reliability and simplicity. Isolation, reliability, simplicity and the Johnny Joint's extreme range of motion are what sets the Currie Johnny Joints apart from all other spherical joint designs regardless of the source.

The Hot Parts/J&M LCAs and UCA are the best of the cheap LCAs & UCAs out there if not for their production quality (which matches UMI et al.) certainly for their use of the superior Currie type Johnny Joints. Sadly the J&M LCA's with Johnny Joints are not adjustable but you could order a pair of Steeda's adjustable LCAs and install a Curry Johnny Joint on the Axle end giving you a unique and most excellent street LCA that will allow the chassis side poly bushings to last longer.

Cheers!

Rubrignitz

Interesting information. I originally purchased a double rod-end panhard along with poly/rod-end LCA's. Big, costly mistake. The NVH was unbearable. These 'delsphere' joints are much more livable. I have the adjustment tool for the delrin races so I can adjust them as they wear and spohn sells replacement joints if they ever get to the point of requiring replacement. They work well for me, better than the others I tried. But that's me and what I can live with in terms of NVH may not be what the next guy can.

Riptide

Same here. I'm also getting rid of the poly/poly bushed LCA and replacing with poly/'delsphere'. For the UCA a 'delsphere' on the chassis end with the stock rubber left on the differential for now. Also putting brackets in to help even further with straight line traction. If I don't like them they are easy enough to take out.

I find F1's posts interesting. At least in the case of my car the wheel hop has not been solved by replacing the lowers alone with poly/poly arms. I'm willing to roll my windows down or turn up the stereo in order to deal with any increased NVH. I just want the problem fixed and don't care about the noise @ this point.

908ssp

The way I figure it you only need a few degrees of torsional movement with a light load to be superior to a solid urethane bushing with nearly no torsional movement under severe loads. With one wheel all the way up and the other all the way down you're looking at what maybe 10 degrees of torsional movement at the lower control arm. Any of the poly-ball joints should do that with considerably less strain than solid urethane bushings on both ends. And what torsional strain the soft rubber of the J&M poly-ball uses is going to be in line with the stock soft rubber bushings probably less.

Rubrignitz

YES! This was discussed in detail somewhere, can't recall where but you are correct, they do only need a few degrees of rotational movement (which they provide) at full extension in our suspensions.

6-Speed

F1Fan: I assume the J&M Extreme Joint is what you are advocating. The merits of the Johnny Joint have certainly perked my interest in them.

Aside from allowing the joint to articulate, the Johnny Joint is still packed in a poly bushing. So will the extreme joint add objectionable NVH for a normal street driven car? What advantage does the Johnny Joint have over the Sphon Del-sphere?

Thanks for the informative posts.

http://www.hotpart.com/shop/index.ph...ct_detail&p=53

F1Fan

I don't like to guess which is why I measured this stuff years ago. I set my S197GT chassis up on four stands in my garage and pulled out the rear springs and disconnected the rear anti-roll bar at the axle on both ends. With the rear axle at full droop I put a floor jack under the right side of the axle and pumped it up until it stopped. Then I got under the car for a look, the over axle part of the chassis did not touch the stock axle bumpstop and it did not compress the bumpstop. Something was limiting the rear axle travel and it smelled like the LCA's joints.


At the time of this little bit of eyeballing and tinkering my car's rear end had Tokico D-Spec dampers, Steeda coilover spring ride height adjusters, Hypercoil 250lb/in springs, Steeda Comp/Street UCA w/H.D. UCA mount, Steeda 20.5mm anti-roll bar with matching billet end-links, a Saleen PJ Watt's linkage and Steeda adjustable LCAs and BMR weld-in LCA relocation brackets. I personally installed and adjusted all of these suspension bits.



There is one more thing I need to mention, the Steeda adjustable LCAs were sort of modified using modified poly bushings on the chassis side and Aurora mil. spec. lined rod-ends on the axle side of the LCAs. You cannot buy the good stuff you kind of have to make them yourself. Here is a long story about the bushings.


I had to modify the chassis side of the bushings because the Steeda supplied steel chrome-moly alloy bushing sleeves while very light and strong had a thin wall cross-section that could not offer a large enough face to seat well in the chassis' LCA pockets. The small cross section bushing sleeves combined with a very loose sleeve to bolt fit causes the bushing sleeves to walk around on the bolt and in the chassis side LCA pockets even when fully torqued to factory specs. This in turn allows the bushing sleeves to slowly crush and fail while at the same time they are distorting the bushings which ruins their low compliance. The first time I saw this I was very concerned. The second time I saw this I had to find a permanent solution.


Here are the damaged bushing sleeves. Note the bend, distortion and cracks starting on the ends of the sleeves.



Why have a high performance LCA with crappy bushings? After all low compliance is the whole reason for using poly, it's NOT because poly is a durable, quiet bushing material LOL! By allowing increasing compliance you just ruin the handling precision of the rear axle because it's no longer precisely located and the rear axle is busy moving fore and aft which causes the car to steer itself in unexpected ways at unexpected times especially when on the track. Not a good situation IMO.

The solution I came up with was to machine a pair of new steel bushing sleeves with a class 2 fit over the LCA bolts and with about the same external dimensions as was used in the stock stamped LCAs. Of course this meant that I had to bore out the poly bushings to an interference fit with the new much larger bushing sleeves so it would all go back together snug. A PITA but boy does it work now! Much less compliance than with even new original bushings and sleeves but there may or may not have been an increase in tire noise to the cabin.

So as you can see these LCA bushings do not allow as much movement as any other normal poly bushing would so this is a somewhat qualified situation which is why I am mentioning this modification. It may have had an affect on my test and measurement results. I don't think it is a huge change but it seems likely (at least to me) that the modified LCAs may have slightly increased the required amount of allowable misalignment on the axle side of the LCAs.

Here is how I solved the problem. This image does not show the flat outer poly bushing that goes over the bushing sleeve.




Anyway I didn't think there was going to be any mechanical interference but guess what? I was wrong, it happens once in a while. The limiting factor for axle travel was the Aurora mil. spec. rod-ends which allow a 12 degree misalignment angle! This causes the LCAs to rotate in the chassis side mounting bracket (but only a little bit because as you can see the poly bushing has no place to go) and the rod-ends still limited the travel of the axle at max. droop and compression.

So I then dusted off a set of GT500 LCAs and installed them in my chassis and tried the same stuff. Guess what? There was no mechanical interference at all and the only limit was provided by the axle bumpstop and the length of the fully extended D-Spec rear damper! BTW, D-Specs are exactly the same length compressed or extended as compared to the stock struts and dampers.

So for my next test I installed some Aurora mil.spec. rod-ends that allow a significantly higher misalignment angle (of 19 degrees) into the same modified Steeda adjustable LCAs. This allowed full travel of the axle but not full compression of the bumpstop. This tells me that even people with stock full height axle bumpstops are on the edge of mechanical bind even if they used mil. spec. high misalignment rod-ends. For the folks with Eibach's shorter axle bumpstops or cut down bumpstops they are most likely going into mechanical bind at full axle travel extension.


Of course this is an absolute worst case test of the axle's travel and movement. But this does happen once in a while like going into or out of a tall driveway on a hill or an angle. One time I was driving into a parking garage driveway and the inside wheel was off the ground and I had to roll back to get traction to continue into the driveway. This caused me to look at my rear end because I was surprised at what happened. Anyway it looks to me that a rod-end or other spehrical joint with at least 20 degrees of misalignment on the axle side is what is needed to maximize suspension travel with stock length rear dampers.

HTH!

F1Fan

6-speed,

Yes the Extreme version is what Hot Parts/J&M started to offer about a year after I prodded them on their own website. I do not know if the Extreme joint is licensed from Currie or Currie purchased product but it looks very similar to Currie's Johnny Joints. The J&M joints look like clones but do not capture the joint assembly in the shell the same way. J&M uses a cheaper to manufacture straight walled joint shell and an extra clip to retain and locate the ball assembly. This is not as strong or as simple a design but for the way the LCA ends are stressed should not be a big problem.

The poly bushing is only used to line the metal spherical joint, there is no poly to retard the free movement of the ends of the spherical ball joint as in the so called "poly ball joint" they market.

The only real issue with the Delrin captured spherical joints is the nearly metal on metal NVH transmission of road and tire noises through these joints. For a street car Delrin is a very poor bushing material, trust me I've used it in plenty of cars for anti-roll bars and straight on axis control arms and suspension links. Delrin is very hard and as such transmits nearly 100% of the NVH presented to the joint right on through the control arm or linkage. This means that you might just as well use a metal on metal rod-end or spherical joint for your LCAs, the noise levels will be about the same.

HTH!

6-Speed

I was looking for some Currie products and came across some control arm products that they have for Mustangs featuring the Johnny Joint. They are on the more expensive side, but they appear to be well executed.

http://www.currieenterprises.com/ces...E.aspx?id=2761

http://www.currieenterprises.com/ces...E.aspx?id=2760

http://www.currieenterprises.com/ces...E.aspx?id=2745