Re: Uprated Trailing Arms
Posted: Fri Jan 03, 2020 8:08 pm
It wouldn’t need a pan hard bar as the centre bars provide the lateral movement prevention.Carledo wrote: ↑Fri Jan 03, 2020 9:41 am Anything over 250bhp and you'll be looking for a different axle too as that's about the limit of what a Sprint unit can handle.
Im not sure that rose joints won't provide a little too MUCH articulation and force you to adopt a Panhard rod to control axle sideways location adequately.
If I was to be designing such an item (with KISS as my guiding principal) i'd keep the tubular bushes at each end and merely replace the pressed arm with a nice strong bit of tube, a U bracket welded to it to support the shock mount and some sort of drop plate for the ARB if you keep it. The main thing to get rid of, if practical, is the "kick up" at the axle end which introduces the fatal stress point.
Whilst most failures of the originals are probably overload induced, it's by no means exclusive. A couple of years ago, I changed one out that had failed on a 1500 auto, you'd be hard pushed to find one LESS stressed than that! Old age and corrosion were the culprits in that case. The failed trailing arm was only the thin end of the wedge on that car, I don't think i've EVER seen a Dolomite quite so rotten that was still in regular use, nor one with SO many patch repairs! It was scrapped shortly after, as it's chances of another legit MOT were effectively zero.
Steve
Thinking about it last night and the design you described is what I was thinking would be best.
And wow, that must have been one very shot trailing arm if it failed on that.
I just think that if it’s a known failure point, maybe it should be looked into