Macpherson or double wishbone?

Was crewing for Pollard's '96-ish? Civic at Mendocino when the lower ball joint on the pass front control arm gave up the ghost. Started thinking about the merits of converting the mid 90's Civic front suspension to macpherson using RSX bits for an open lite car. Figure there'd be some travel gained with the macpherson setup, but the strut towers would have to be fiddled with a bit and inserts are a bit more pricey vs off the shelf HD stock replacements.

Pros? Cons? Thoughts? Comments?

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KK6EAR

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RallySol
Figure there'd be some travel gained with the macpherson setup

based on my experiments, very close to 9" at the wheel should be possible on the EF with nothing more than a de-spacered Billy HD for the EK. I know there's geometry differences between the different cars, but I can't imagine they're that huge.

There's plenty of reasons to consider struts over the a-arms, but unless you've got $texas$ to spend on CV joints, I'm not sure there's usable wheel travel to be gained.

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KF7RWG
http://www.utahrallygroup.com

ok, I mis-remembered slightly - the 9" measurement is where the parts start running into each other, ball joints hit their limits, etc.

EK bilstein with the spacer removed will be something like 7.8" at the wheel.

http://www.rallyanarchy.com/phorum/read.php?5,76139,76139

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KF7RWG
http://www.utahrallygroup.com

Ball joints fail on strut cars also.

The Honda suspension has worked pretty well in reality for rally.

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heymagic
Ball joints fail on strut cars also.

The Honda suspension has worked pretty well in reality for rally.

But gotta say that little tiny ball joints with pins the size of a pencil break easier,
and little tiny ball joints with pins the size of pencils, passing thru some loooooooooooooooooooooong swoooopy goose neck thing swoooping up and out of the knuckle made of brittle CAST IRON which often enough we see broken are a lot more LIKELY to fail, and fail again and again...

and little tiny ball joints with pins the size of pencils, passing thru some loooooooooooooooooooooong swoooopy goose neck thing swoooping up and out of the knuckle made of brittle CAST IRON which often enough we see broken are a lot more LIKELY to fail, and fail again and again...
offer no particular service, or competitive advantage.

Indeed the weak nature of the whole Honda front end seems to be a major dis-advantage for no advantage..

just saying

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John Vanlandingham
Sleezattle, WA, USA

Vive le Prole-le-ralliat

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But they aren't laying around dead in the middle of a stage on a regular basis and they easily see past 200,000 miles in daily use with no big issues.

Hadn't thought of over extending the CVs, thats a very important thing not to do. Great link Aaron, I'll have to try that with my car. For reasons unrelated to research or homework I have 15s with tallish tires.

I'm not saying theres anything wrong with the stock suspension, just wondering if it could be better and if it would be worth the effort.

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KK6EAR

Nothing wrong with Honda double wishbone. Nothing that cant be reinforced. And the ball joint pins arent that small. Same size as the RSX. No reason to believe its a fail point if maintenance is there. I drove mine this past weekend at RWV like a mad man over some pretty rough stuff catching an Evo10 twice and after rally inspection shows no problems. That setup is very decent.

Now the RSX junk is not going to work very well because it has the steering arm halfway up the strut. Its better to use the 06+ civic Si upright and strut. Or like my plans are is to use the Evo upright and strut.