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I’ve never used Protech before, but coming from the TVR world I've many friends who have, and generally their experience with the company and their products has been very good. For a period of time, I did run Gaz Gold Pros on my Chimaera from Protech’s main competitor Gazzmatic Suspension, but I didn’t get on with them so I went back to Bilstein which were excellent.
I would have liked a set of Bilstein coil overs on the front of Monty, but Bilstein only work with re-sellers, this would have added time and complication for the custom coil over build required for Monty’s Mulfab front wishbone conversion. Protech made this process incredibly easy, within just a few hours the old AVOs were thoroughly appraised, measured and dyno tested before the perfect set of custom Protech 400s were built for Monty by Tim.
Counting the clicks yesterday proved my single adjuster Protech 400s (bump & rebound are set with the same adjuster knob) shows I actually have 13 settings available in total. However, from previous experience of adjustable coil overs click 1 & click 13 should be avoided, so in practice I have a range of 11 clicks to work with which is proving plenty.
Tim at Protech recommended 6 clicks from soft as a good mid-way starting point, I did a quick down and dirty static bounce test at the recommended 6 and felt I could go firmer, so set them at 8 clicks for the drive home. This seemed to work well, if a shade firm, so I've been going one click softer at a time and then testing the effects on my favourite back road where I know every turn, dip, camber change and break in the road surface like the back of my hand.
Monty became quicker and quicker each click I removed, so a more compliant setting is definitely what the car wants, interestingly the firmer setting of 8 clicks I started out with had a negative effect on the rear, my guess is a more rigid front end setup was passing more torsion loads through Morgan’s rather flexible traditional chassis that ultimately could unsettle the rear as the car moved at pace over rougher road surfaces.
I've now ended up with what seems to be the halo setting of 5 clicks from full soft, this with the brand new 275 lb springs that I suspect still have some settling to do. A setting of 5 clicks seems quite soft to me, but it's absolutely what the car wants. At 5 clicks Monty has never covered ground so quickly, and on my favourite back road I can confidently say he's noticeably quicker than my old 4.0 litre TVR Chimaera that had 238 horsepower and 260 lbs/ft of torque.
Monty runs Bilsteins on the rear from SSL which are doing a great job considering the design limitations of the live axle, and Morgan’s rather ‘interesting’ attempt at fitting telescopic dampers. I appreciate much has already been written about why the rear suspension on a modern Trad Morgan has issues, but the very limited travel aside, to me one of the mistakes made was the damper eyelet orientation chosen my Morgan.
The arrangement is clearly fighting itself, there must be some horrible twisting forces going on because the way they’ve been fitted means the dampers can’t pivot and swing with the axle as the leaf springs flatten, quite simply the eyelet orientation is 90 degrees wrong. Clearly there’s the potential for some serious stiction, and I wouldn’t mind betting this means on sudden load there’s some momentary damper lockup briefly sending the rear end into hardtail mode, which is the true source of the spine jarring experience we all know and love.
Anyway, I digress, what I’ve proved with my Protech front damper setting experiments on Monty is, a more compliant front end definitely helps (if not cures) the situation at the rear.
Dave.
