Reply to "Aluminum Modded Front Suspension Wanted"

My Pantera has Ron Siple's upper control arms at all 4 corners, which means the upper control arms pivot on heim joints at all 4 corners. Unfortunately all 4 lower control arms pivot on urethane. I put a lot of miles on my Pantera with this set-up, so I thought I'd offer my thoughts on the subject of heim joints.

I kinda like the heim joints, I don't like urethane. I've been thinkin' about modifying the lower control arms for heim joints too. I don't notice an increase in road harshness on the open road, actually the heim joints reduce friction, and I think the suspension floats better over the kind of bumps you find on freeways and highways. And the steering is very precise. But the heim joints do not isolate road noise, and at slow speeds they transmit the harshness of poorly paved roads into the passenger compartment. When I drove around town in my old hometown of Fillmore I always wished I had all factory rubber in the suspension. (FYI: The heim joints are not lined with rubber or teflon, that sounds like it would make them prone to failure)

So on the open road I like heim joints, but around town I prefer the factory rubber bushings. I want to convert to 100% one or the other, but I haven't made up my mind which way to go. I don't live in Fillmore any longer, the pavement on the roads in Ventura is generally much better.

My car is lowered, the front end is lowered more than the rear, and the steering is very twitchy. I haven't measured it, but I'm sure my caster is in the negative range. I frankly don't care if the caster is ever 6 degrees positive, I just want enough to remove the twitchy-ness from the steering. Its supposed to have 2 degrees and 40 minutes positive caster off the showroom floor, I assume this setting wasn't arrived at randomly, that is probably the amount required to cancel the outer front tires tendency towards positive camber in turns. Therefore to achieve ~3 degrees or more positive caster with my chassis set-up the way it is would make me deliriously happy. Obviously, if I converted the lower control arms to heim joints, I could space the lower control arms all the way forward in the tabs & space the upper control arms all the way rearward in the tabs, and that should be enough.

-G