Modding stock fox rear CA's??

[Dan B.]

I'm getting ready to work on the back end of a fox....mainly the control arms. Was going to replace them with tubular arms but the toy budget has tightened up lately so I'm going to pursue a different plan.

New plan. Want to replace the stock rubber bushings with poly. Next, since I have a lot of steel plate laying around and pretty good with a welder I'm going to put a piece of plate on the bottom of the arms to basically box them. This along with the poly bushings should make them much more rigid and cost about nothing.

Anyone ever tried this or does the idea sounds reasonable?

[frankstang]

If this is a street car you really don't want them rigid. They are designed to flex.
But yeah, many people have boxed the stock control arms.

[Dan B.]

Agressive street with maybe a little autocross mixed in.

[wick]

http://www.steelcitystangs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=860

[Dan B.]

Excellent....that was my plan. Thanks!

[Mater]

http://www.steelcitystangs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=860

O no u didnt!:rotflol:

[Tony71502]

Don't know if I'd recommend rigid control arms for auto-x... much less the 4 link setup.

http://mustangforums.com/forum/suspension/553765-the-official-suspension-guide.html Check out the second post on there and illustrates some the damage rigid control arms can cause.

[Mark Aubele]

Agressive street with maybe a little autocross mixed in.

Not a good idea for autocross, although it isn't too bad as long as you keep the stock uppers. To oversimplify things a bit, for the four link suspension to articulate, there has to be flex in the bushings. When you remove that, the suspension binds, causing effective spring rate to increase with rear axle articulation, causing the snap oversteer at high levels of cornering force. Basically the harder you drive the car the looser it will get. When I ran aftermarket lowers with the stock four link (and a panhard bar= even more bind) the car would pull the rear tire off of the ground in corners at autocrosses. Going to the three link rear solved all the problems, and gave the sort of traction out of corners allowing the car to pull the front tire as seen in the avatar (also caused by having the rear spring rate too soft at the time as well). The same mods that let the car hook better at the dragstrip work against it in corners (stock four link that is, my 60' times went down after switching to the three-link, 1.82 on Kumho MX, 1.76 on Toyo RA-1s, 12.5s@109 on both tires same powertrain with 475lb coilovers, car 60' 1.70 on stock suspension on 235/60 BFG DRs, but never got below 1.9 on any sort of street tire with it, admittedly had pretty stiff spring rates).

Having said all that, if that is the only thing you do you should be ok. Feel free to give me a call if you want to talk about it, you should still have my number.