[The WidowMaker]

Here are some of the frame rebuild pics. A few things have led to the almost complete rebuild, but the ride height was the main item. I really couldn’t drop the car to where I wanted without a major overhaul, so after spending all that time painting the frame, it got cut and ground back up.

So a “few” things happened in order to make the ride height happen. The first issue was that the short springs I put in the rear just weren’t short enough. In order to get it to a good ride height, it took 600 lbs in the trunk. At this point, the springs were almost compressed, and the top and bottom perches weren’t lining up (the top and bottom perches were perpendicular to the ground, but they were about 3” off fore and aft from each other). So, I decided that if I had to get rid of the stock spring perches, I would convert to coilovers in the rear.

In addition to the issues with the springs, the geometry of the stock suspension went to crap at the lowered ride height. My antisquat was through the roof, and I had introduced roll steer with the angle of the lca’s in addition to raising my RRCH even further. So I designed some new axle brackets that did a few things; first they allowed multiple height adjustments for the lca to change anti squat and roll steer, plus they also adapted the Chris Alston’s chassis works shock mounts with ride height adjustment for the coilovers. 40 hours of Corel Draw (a lot of different ideas) and $200 in waterjetting later, this solved both the geometry and the shock issues.

The other issue with the stock suspension was the converging upper control arms. To eliminate the binding associated with this suspension, I fabbed up some new uca’s and mounted them parallel with the frame centerline. They also have adjustments in height at the front and rear for antisquat, and they are of course adjustable for pinion angle adjustments. Since the UCA’s no longer controlled side to side axle migration, I built a watts link. I looked into a phb before I considered the watts, but packaging was still a nightmare and there were other inherent issues with it as well. One of those issues became apparent while talking with Mark. He had a customer that kept ripping his phb mounts off the frame. He wasn’t breaking the welds, he was tearing the frame itself. In addition to that, if the frame didn’t have a crossmember, it was likely that the side with the frame mount for the bar would actually get sucked in during hard cornering. So since I needed a crossmember to keep all of that from happening (plus I needed one for the coilovers anyways), the only difference between the two systems was the cradle. After doing a whole bunch of mockup and searching for ideas, I ended up with something that resembles the lat dynamics 3 link setup.






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Once all the welding was done on the housing, I shipped it off (well, actually I drove it) to Currie to have it narrowed and have 9” ends welded on. They gave it back to me set up with new axles, straightened and with the gears setup.