This weeks instalment.
Escorts suffer badly from bump steer at the front. This is mostly because the arms off the rack are very short and as the wheel articulates the angle on the short arms changes the steering input to the wheel. Not much you can do without major changes and the best thing is to get the arms as level as possible at normal ride height. On rally cars, like our donor, they often spin the rack arms upside down to fix this as well as running a lowered rack mount. Our Escort has longer struts cobbled together off a Capri V6 which doesn't help with a road oriented car. The rack ends are back the right way and with the lowered rack mounts look ok...
Also the cars dive pretty badly under brakes because the front radius arm is also the sway bar. The bar tends to flex in the middle. Fitting good front shocks fixes much of this (we are running compression biased damping but don't tell anyone) but you can also fit an antidive kit which stops the sway bar flexing and lowers the bar 1". These are about $300 landed with freight and Gerry Harvey tax. So I made my own... Actually I am making two, one for a mate with an Escort that is getting an SR20 turbo.
Raw materials. Imagine the rhs full length and also some 75x5 and 50x5 flatbar. The rhs was split with the jigsaw and then cut to length with the bandsaws. I was intending to use 10mm nb pipe for the crush tubes but had to buy a full 8m length so I am using an offcut of 13mm shs instead. All up $65 for materials including longer bolts for the ends.
Box cut to length with flatbar. lightness and stiffness added. I bought the dimple dies and I am going to use the fuckers!
Antidive bracket tacked up ready for test fitting. The only section that really needed welding was the centre since the loads are taken by crush tubes to the chassis brackets but welded is betterer.
View from above. This will also stiffen the front end somewhat without adding much weight.
View from the front. It is quite difficult to fit this because of the way the front end is bolted together so I dropped the sway bar back out of the lower arms and pretty much unbolted everything. Jack is under the left to check articulation and clearances.
I took the opportunity to check Ackermann geometry based on the nominal centre of the rear axle and all is good. I will adjust the camber and castor and measure the link lengths before they come off again for painting.
Hopefully we will have the diff next week and then the fun starts. I have done a fair amount of googling and the brackets for the Watts link droppers are going to be fairly substantial. The longer link especially. I am thinking now of using some 50x50x3 shs as the dropper trimmed to fit the link end and then bracing that front and rear and to the centre with left over 50x50x3 and the 100x50x3 box from the antidive mount. Easier than bending up a complex shape from 3mm plate.
When the diff is in I will fit the under floor fuel tank and see if I have room to fit a VE Commode charcoal canister. This will free up some space in the engine bay and get the fuel vapours away from the engine. If not it will have to be a VT (?) Cylindrical canister in the engine bay next to the catch can.
And I have found that the ride height is about right when these heavy front springs are set with the maximum strut length. That wont work on the road because the springs are too stiff and they have about 50mm of clearance on full droop but with the free height of the strut and the free height of the spring and compressed length at normal ride height I can get a feel for the spring k and see what is around that will suit.