Well I guess this is where i chime in....
The noise is due to gear noise being transmitted and amplified up the TA into the floor right were you sit. It is aweful when there is a light load on the drivetrain, ie cruise. We never addressed this, and yes we run a fullfloat 9" with trutrac.
The TA failed because of insufficient shock valving. The shocks we used were top quality AFCO shocks, double adjustable. Not an actual drag shock with no rebound. With that being said, the shocks are likely a bit too soft on the rebound side, and will be addressed or replaced, Rodney what did you lose my number? The hop occurred under very hard braking on poor surfaces when approaching a stop. This actualy bent the TA in the opposite direction, and found the weakest link in the arm, then tore. Thank God it didn't completely fail while driving.
Blake furnished us with a shock/spring package to try, and a new beefed up TA. We went from 225 to 300# rear springs. and a custom valved set of ridetech single adj shox. The ride was horrible. We started with the rebound in the middle. After 6 runs, we backed off the rebound about 5 clicks from the middle setting, and the car responded well by freeing up the rear instead of overpowering the front end. The rear was really hooked up, almost too much corner bite. We actually had the rear of the car hop mid corner, and softening the rebound helped this well. I was more pleased with the car than I had been since we put the set up in. Then I hopped in Sean's car which has my old leafspring set up in it and ran about .5 seconds faster.
So when we got home and unloaded the car, I found the panhard mount was nearly broken off the rear crossmember/shock mount. Yikes. Likely from the side loading, stiff shocks, etc. Again glad it didn't completely fail while driving. We shared this info with Blake to consider making changes to the durability of the panhard mount.
As of right now, our car is still broken, and our season cut short. We will fix it and make some improvements, which we haven't completely come up with a game plan.
In conclusion. We chose Speedtech TA because we didn't feel we had the time or resources to design our own rear set up and Speedtech has a good reputation and are a bunch of good guys whom we have built a relationship with over the past few years. We also wanted a product to offer to our customers to compliment the rest of our product line. We only sell stuff we run at custom works. The installation of the TA was a breeze. Fit and finish is very high. on a average street driven car, this set up would be great, especially on a mini tub big tire car. We run our car to the limits, and apparently slightly beyond! I'm confident that this has been a good learning experience for ALL of us. We will see you guys NEXT season.
Keith Smith
Custom Works Performance
Mike- thanks for pointing this thread out for me
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