Coilovered Tacoma... any constructive thoughts?

[sled_dog]

Here are some pictures of the Coilover SAS Tacoma my friend has built in the shop. Any constructive criticism is welcome. It is sitting 3" higher than anticipated. Something is screwed up with the springs. King suppossedly speced them out for 7" of shaft at ride height(which the design was later switched to 5" so we could lower the truck a little and try to avoid the oilpan). However with the adjusters ALL the way up there is 8" of shaft showing. He is supposed to call King today to see whats what. For anyones curiosity the shocks are 14" King 2.5s and the coils are, a 14" 350lb and a 16" 450lb. Besides the ride height the second biggest problem is the rear is just far lower. He has 4" rear springs, 4" blocks, and 1" lift shackles in the rear, plus I took the overload spring off of his stock spring pack and installed it on the 4" springs so its somewhere around 10-10.5" of lift in the rear

My only thought is the roll center is going to be low.

 

[Seventy4Blazer]

what kind of rear springs are they? why not mix and match stock with the 4 inchers, maybe shave the block down a bit.

front looks good, but like you said it is riding higher. should be fun to drive in the sand though.

refresh my memory, roll center affects what?
Grant

 

[sled_dog]

its an imaginary point where the body/frame/everything sort of pivots around. Low roll center, more body roll, less stability.


He is from New Hampshire, plans to trail ride and crawl with it. Supercharged V6 under the hood he wants to hop up more for some fun.


have been considering mixing and matching. I gave him the rear springs out of my S10 for him to play with. He was talking about throwing one or two leaves from that in to even it up a bit. I bet he probably will.

 

[mikey_d05]

Please excuse my ignorance since I have no experience when it comes to coilovers. However, could you not just swap out either of the springs for a lighter one? Other than that, all I can think of is to move the mounts up but that wouldn't solve the travel issue, it'd just raise the whole shock in relation to the vehicle.

Keep us posted on whatever you do. I'm trying to digest all I can about coilovers.

 

[sled_dog]

can't move the shock up anymore. Would require going through the inner fenderwells and he doesn't want to do that(computers and such mounted on the driver side). If it were me the shocks would be through the hood. Lighter spring rate coils could be done but the question is, would that soften the ride too much?

 

[mikey_d05]

How much weight do tender/keeper/whatever they call 'em springs collapse under?

If they remain compressed at ride load (not drooped out) you could use a 3" shorter spring of the same rate and a keeper spring at the top. If they are too far from being compressed at ride height then I'm out of uneducated guesses.

 

[sled_dog]

triple rate would be nice, but have to get another slider and the tender coils. Where as King should(damn well better) replace the coils he has now for free. They are the ones who set the shocks up and they aren't right so I sure hope they replace them. I told him to order Sway-A-Ways from Poly Performance, but he just didn't listen to me(never does, always asks me after the fact).

 

[mikey_d05]

Very true...I just figured if he was throwing that much money at that pretty of a truck he'd have the extra cash to put into a slider and a tender coil.

I'll stop guessing and let someone who actually knows jack about c/o's respond now.

 

[Grim-Reaper]

Needs more beef added to the mounts. Toy frames are notorious for tearing out. Need to use large plates with rosettes and gussets.


The towers need a brace across the engine. Again the frame is being loaded in such a way it can twist and tear out the lower mounts.

So what size tire is it going to run?


Low CG is where its at. Those tower need to be higher up. The computers under the hood are usually pretty water proof. He could have booted it the towers too.

You can get 38's on a SAS toy with 6 inches suspension 2 body and shift the front axle forward a little little hammer time on the inner fender and clip the lower fender. If you want to hack the floor some you can clear 38s with 5 inches of lift.


Lot of really nice parts on that truck that are going to go to waste because of the high CG if he cant get it down some. It will be a good mud truck but its going to be a tippy rock crawler and hes going to have a hell of a time with drive-line angles.

 

[sled_dog]

good info. I agree on the strut bar across the engine but there is no underhood room and he doesn't want to poke through the hood.

Also agree with low CG. Everyone at school was all happy seeing it sky high. They'd say "your S10 will be bigger won't it?" Hell no, it will be smaller and I'm quite proud of that.

37" IROKs is his plan.

Big problem is this, he really can't lower the truck. Geometry was already sacrificed for teh sake of oil pan clearance. He put on a rear sump pan which gained a lot of clearance but still not great. In the end if the truck were to drop say 6" it would have baout 4 or 5" of uptravel before the links bashed the oil pan into submission. If it were mine, I'd just move the front axle forward, or better yet 3 link it and not worry about it. But its not mine.

 

[willyswanter]

Did you give them an accurate sprung weight per corner?

 

[sled_dog]

he measured it then subtracted some weight because of the IFS still being in place when measuring. No idea how scientific or accurate he was. We weighed it today and it came out close to the same as what he had told King(he told them the front end was about 2000). No idea what he told them per corner. A comment on Pirate was that the spring rates are twice what they should be. I really don't know anything about spring rate selection so I don't know.

 

[willyswanter]

You weighed the entire front end or the sprung weight? If your weiging the entire front end including the axles and tires/wheels and all that then thats your problem. Since you already have some coils on your shocks you can use them to measure the weight. If your spring has a free length of 16" and it's sitting at 13" right now and has a rate of 500lbs then there must be 1500lbs of sprung weight on that spring.

 

[joez]

He needs to beef those mounts on the frame up bigtime, or else he will be tearing those off the frame and just leaving some nice holes. Frame should have been plated as well, but that should hold so long as he braces it well. Run a "strut bar" type brace as a bare minum between the two towers.

 

[sled_dog]

the frame is plated at the front mount. It is plated from the forward body mount back halfway through the coilover mount. We had to eliminate a crumple zone in both framerails and put a place to mount the steering box on the driver side. I'll talk to him about some of these thoughts.