I can only speak from personal experience but with my own findings further supported by the additional evidence I've pieced together from Monty's file, it seems quite clear the original owner really wasn't happy with the car's ride and handling from day one, sadly this seems to be a recurring theme with owners of Trad Morgans.
Let's break it down seperating the front from the rear:
FRONT SUSPENSION
To solve the front end issues the original owner made a smart but expensive choice, he commisioned the complete deleting of Morgan's vintage sliding pillar arrangement replacing it with the Mulfab front wishbone conversion. Other than it's use of AVO dampers, a brand of damper I'm not a massive fan of and will soon replace with vastly superior Bilsteins, I would describe Monty's front suspension as excellent, Peter Mulbury who designed the wishbone setup clearly knew what he was doing.
REAR SUSPENSION
Unfortunately the Morgan specialist Monty's original owner entrusted the rear suspension improvement project to was less skilled!
Disapointingly that so-called Morgan specialist completely overlooked the true issue, instead of correctly diagnosing the terrible soft rear springs the specialist tried to solve Monty's wayward rear end with a set of AVO dampers. Of course all that happened was the poor AVO's that aren't a great damper in the first place, had a really hard life so didn't last long at all and as the heavily over worked AVO dampers rapidly lost resistance the situation only got worse.
With the terrible rear springs still in place and whipping uncontrollably due to poor/no tempering the damping from the AVOs soon became nonexistent, the next thing to go were the AVO bushes that are well known failure point amongst owners of other classic cars using AVOs. Being made from a poor and failure prone polyurethane material rather than a proper suspension grade rubber as used by serious damper manufacturers such as Bilstein these bushes dont have the longest life in a decent setup, but in a Morgan with floppy rear springs and shot AVOs I found these aweful bushes would only last 500 miles at best.
Worse still, I discovered that so called Morgan specialist who fitted the AVOs had also used standard M10 bolts on the top damper mounts, this when high tensile 7/16" bolts should be used, the smaller diameter M10 bolts created slop with the subsequent movement resulting in the soft M10 bolts shearing. What a mess, and all because the Morgan specialist had completely failed to correctly diagnose the true route cause issue, the soft rear springs!
To solve the issue I selected and fitted the following components:
1. A set of BCC anti-tramp rear springs properly made from the correct grade of steel and tempered in Sheffield by Owen springs
2. A set of quality Bilstein rear dampers sourced from SSL
3. Two 7/16 x 6.5" Grade 8 high tensile bolts
4. Two 7/16 (deformed thread) stove nuts & two 7/16 Nylocks to act as jam nuts over them
5. A washer pack to suit and used to replace the dreadful thin wall tube spacer as used by Morgan
6. A Panhard rod to eliminate lateral axle movement
The fundamental route cause of all Monty's rear end issues were those criminally bad rear springs used by Morgan, if anyone is still running them they need to be removed and weighed in for scrap, there are lots of replacement options out there but I chose the BCC anti-tramp springs that have proved to be excellent. According to Techniques Morgan who fitted them for me, the BCC springs are a bit softer than the ones they offer so if you want a firmer ride you may prefer the Techniques springs, personally I would highly recommend the BCC springs for street driving.
My next improvement will be to upgrade Morgan's rather weak and amateurish top damper mount brackets to a far stronger fully caged design, the current tube arrangement is very poor in my opinion although it does seem Morgan were aware of this as Monty did benefit the later version that's been reinforced with gussets, it’s fundamentally still a poor design that needs upgrading to a proper bracket that supports the top damper mount like any other car.
I should also point out at the same time as fitting the suspension upgrades I did also go for lowering blocks that drop the car by 40mm and centralise the rear axle so the wheels look correct in the arches. These lower blocks seem to be criticized on Talk Morgan, however for fear of stating the obvious, the only negatives I’ve found with them is the inevitable loss of ground clearance and some suspension travel.
To fix the ground clearance issue I had the crossmember neatly modified and the stupid lip on the bellhousing removed, you can read about these very successful changes here:
As stated above the lowering blocks also remove suspension travel in direct proportion to how much they lower the car, actually it would be more correct to say the lowering blocks steal travel from the damper. Currently I still have enough travel for a comfortable ride under 90% of all driving conditions, however, during extremely enthusiastic driving on a very bumpy road the axle can lift on the rebound.
The solution is linked to the improved fully caged damper top mounts I have planned, when designing these new stronger brackets we will also raise the mounting point by 40mm giving the damper back its full working stroke. There’s definitely space to raise it which will stop the rear suspension striking the damper’s bump stop, which in some extreme cases can cause the axle to lift taking the tyres off the road surface for a split second.
While this is exciting it needs fixing, as does the strength of the damper top mounts too, fortunately both extending the damper travel and making a better job of the rear damper top mounts will fix both issues with a matching pair of better designed brackets
To help explain all the above better I thought a short video would be the best way to cover the history of Monty's rear suspension, and to clearly show how I fixed the issues:
I hope this helps, the core message here is the springs used by Morgan were dreadful, and they must be replaced before fitting any other upgrades. If you just fit new dampers and leave the soft rear springs in place, as was the approach of the so called Morgan specialist who tried to fix Monty’s wayward rear end, all that’ll happen is you’ll just destroy those new dampers, smash their bushes to bits and even snap the top bolts!
