Well, I don't know if it will happen this year or not (it's starting to look like not; unforeseen life expenses will eat into your discretionary budget ), but I'm definitely going to put a high end suspension on my 1990 as my next major upgrade. I'm still not sure what it will be, but it will almost certainly be either the Flyin' Miata AFCOs or the 949 Racing Club Sports. I'm a firm believer in "do it once, do it right" and either of those will let me do anything I might ever want to do with my Miata in the future.
I'm leaning towards the Club Sports, because while they are slightly less adjustable in that they have one adjuster that is primarily rebound and at the stiff end of its range adjusts the compression "knee point" a little bit (as compared to the AFCOs with separate rebound and compression adjustments), they are upgradeable to double-adjustable and even triple-adjustable. Yes, I know that doesn't quite follow the rule I just laid out, and I could just spend that money up front, but I know at this point I simply don't know enough to use even the double adjustments of the AFCO setup intelligently, whereas a coordinated single adjuster I do think I could use to my benefit.
But what I wanted to talk about really was my fiendishly clever plan for my car and its alignment, and what changes I'll make to it for the winter months. Because the reality is that while I want an aggressive street setup for the spring, summer and early fall, for the months of November through March, I'm quite likely to want to take my Miata on roads that have significant snow cover and in particular roads where the snow is packed down in the centre of the lane and your tires drive down ruts on either side.
Right: ground clearance. Setting the Miata to a ride height that is appropriate for the most fun and performance on my 6ULs with Toyo T1R tires in the summer is going to leave it critically short of ground clearance once I want to get to the ski resorts (or even down my own street after the sort of winter storms we're often receiving in Vancouver these days; global warming isn't working out for us!). Heck, even with my car at stock height (about 13.75" front and a little less rear; I know my rear is drooping) I often have trouble.
So what I'd like to do is set up the car for summer driving, align it, and then simply raise it up high in the winter. That is one thing that a threaded-body coilover should make dead simple. But what would that do to the alignment? Would the numbers that work in the summer move into a range that isn't feasible in the winter? If I take the numbers I've seen bandied around?Icehawk's alignment for instance?then I'd be running about 12.75-13" front ride height and -1.5° front camber with rears at
13.25-13.5 and -2°. So what would that give me if I used the threaded spring perches to raise the whole thing up 1.5" for the winter?Enter Jyri J. Virkki and a web page that he created:
At first, it wouldn't work in Safari on my Mac, but after emailing him, he very kindly fixed it less than 12 hours after I first told him it didn't work.
What I did was work backwards:
I set the ride height in each applet to my planned *winter* height (because it only shows camber from static ride height into bump) and then adjusted the static camber until I got a close match to my desired summer camber at the summer ride height in the column of figures to the right of the graph.
Bottom line, if I setup the car for front: 12.75"/-1.5°, rear:
13.25"/-2.0°, when I raise the car for winter, I'll get f:14.25"/-0.2°, r:14.75"/-1.1°; which seems like it would be perfectly acceptable numbers to run with 185/60-14 snow tires mounted on steel wheels (or daisies if I can find a set).The only thing that might need to be reset each fall and spring would be front toe.
What do you guys think?