Friday, August 28, 2009

Topics in discusion

Hi all

Here is the next segment for the Blog, "Topics in Discussion". It's just my two cents on a few topics. This weeks segment is on Spring Spacers...


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Spring Spacers have been a great, affordable and easy fit invention for adding a small, non mechancial, lift to off road vehicles. Spacers can be used to add extra lift without needing to purchase a whole new suspension kit.


They are particularly good and counteracting 'sag'. I know of people who have spent their cash on a full lift kit then added a bullbar and spotties only to find the car sags in the front because of the extra weight. Same again for those who like to pack up the back of their vehicles when they are going camping or for work. Any extra weight in the back can bring the back down in a sag. Spacers are a great solution to get the car sitting correctly again.

Spacers are also great for those who are not interested in a big lift but who just want a little extra height underneath. They can also be made available in a heap of colours if you have a colour theme happening on your rig.

Now for some real info!!
If you add 20mm spacers to most vehicles you can still get away without adding other parts too. This would be true on most but for Independent Front Suspension (IFS) vehicles it can be different. Take a Suzuki Jimny and a Suzuki Vitara for instance. The Jimny has a solid axle front so when you add a 20mm coil spacer it will provide a 20mm lift. But when you add 20mm spacers to a vitara front you will get 40mm of lift due to the pivoting of the suspension arm.


This bigger lift means you will need to get longer struts or strut spacers. Also the bigger the lift you for, the less travel you will have and the more likely it is that you could damage your shocks when they TOP OUT!!

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50mm spacers with new shocks as old ones were to small.

Now if you add spacers to an already lifted vehicle then you may need to add extras. I had some Jimny coil spacers made for a customer that were 50mm, who already had a 40mm lift giving the Jimny a 90mm lift overall. Nice, but this bought up more issues to solve, we then had to add front and rear adjustable panhard rods so that the diffs still sat in the middle. The bigger lift also meant that the brake lines were too tight at full flex, so
new aftermarket ones were fitted. A cheap lift fix with $600 of parts to make it work.


Anything over 50mm on a jimny and you will need to add more parts to make it work.

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Also I want to say that if you have a 10 year old vehicle with the factory suspension, sticking in some big spacers will work for a bit but the coils will fatigue very quickly. Old suspension is best upgraded first, and then if you still require more lift, look at a set of spacers.
If your suspension is good then by all means, add some spacers.


You will also need to make sure the spacers are a correct fit for your vehicle as spacers that do not fit 100% can become a problem down the track!

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Rear of Jimny that has no bump stop so the spacer holds the spring in during flex!!

Catch you all soon

Tim

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