Which Tubular Front Control Arms for 68-72 GM A Body

[kp.touring]

Just installed Detroit Speeds upper and lowers into a '69 GTO, totally cool parts.

Kevin

[Marcus SC&C]

Just about every set of tubular arms on the market looks cool. Almost all of them are good quality.
The big question is what do they do? Will they make your car work better somehow? If they`re supposed to make the car work better how do they do that? It`s pretty darn hard to gain any performance with A arms of any kind. After all they only connect a few of the critical suspension points to each other. They don`t define the location of those points. Oh sure you can change static alignment some (which you can also do with shims, offset cross shafts etc.) but apart from that A arms are incapable of creating any other kind of geometry improvement.

If you do what you`ve always done you`ll get what you always got.

What can they do? Well the upper A arms can allow for serious changes in geometry that the stock arms simply won`t allow because they`ll end up being the wrong length,offset and have the ball joints mounted at the wrong angle. Tall spindles and tall ball joint packages ARE capable of making bigtime improvements in geometry and performance. The proper set of arms (designed to work with those changes) can be an important part of the package. We sell whole geometry improving packages complete with fully adj. tubular upper arms for what many places sell just a set of arms for.
Lower tubular arms are almost always clones of stock arms. No change = heh, no change. They`re almost always much heavier too (I know what the ads say...weight them!). Why spend money on them if they`re not going to give you any return on your investment?
There`s only one lower arm I know of that actually has numerous advantages over the stock ones and that`s SPC`s. I know because I was heavily involved in designing them. They have lower seats that will accept either conventional springs OR coil overs. They have adj. ride height with regular springs and shims to adjust coilover travel and installed height if you use those. Greasable delrin bushings std. Optional modern progressive rate jounce bumpers, one of the features that helps new cars drive like new cars. Many aftermarket arms have no bump stops or jounce bumpers at all or they`re simply decorative and non functional. You know the ones that are inches farther away from the frame than the tie rods are... The SPC arms are on average 2lbs. per arm lighter than stock and were designed, strength and fatigue tested on the same computers and equipment used for high dollar Unlimited Class Baja racing trucks. Lastly because they were designed totally clean sheet to work with modernized geometry and alignment settings they will center the front wheels in the wheelwells for maximum tire clearance even with some nose down rake and high + caster settings.
Or you could spend just as much money or a lot more on arms that don`t do anything at all..... Mark SC&C

[Blake Foster]

There`s only one lower arm I know of that actually has numerous advantages over the stock ones and that`s SPC`s. I know because I was heavily involved in designing them. They have lower seats that will accept either conventional springs OR coil overs. They have adj. ride height with regular springs and shims to adjust coilover travel and installed height if you use those. Greasable delrin bushings std. Optional modern progressive rate jounce bumpers, one of the features that helps new cars drive like new cars. Many aftermarket arms have no bump stops or jounce bumpers at all or they`re simply decorative and non functional. You know the ones that are inches farther away from the frame than the tie rods are...

hey that sounds like speed tech arms