Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Maintenance & Servicing Plus4 GDI and Spax dampers?

Will the degree of chassis flex, the chassis absorbs and releases energy in an uncontrolled manner, effectively acting as an undamped, unpredictable extra spring. Will this impact on your carefully designed springs and dampers potentially from working as intended, making it difficult to achieve consistent and precise suspension performance.

Will there ultimately be a need for chassis strengthening to deliver a consistent suspension performance?

It's a Morgan John, consistent and precise suspension performance is just a dream

Good on you, I'm sure a few people will be interested in the results of your modifications.

Thanks Dave, have you tried fitting the Rutherford system to the long doors with the hoop: would it interfere with the hoop. I’m drawn to that as the hoop will afford some protection in an accident although I couldn’t state how much!
Might be worth me giving Tim a call and see what he has to say as I really want to align the movement plane of the shocks. I have the same Bilstein shocks as in your picture and it doesn’t take long or hard driving to cause that level of distortion and premature wear. It’s remarkable that Newelms were correctly orienting the shocks to the correct operating plane for their racing conversion to telescopic shocks when Morgan were still fitting lever arm Armstrong yet when they went over to them they failed to get it right!

No, I've not tried fitting the Rutherford system, I've just noted that it looks right to me.



If you call him, let me know what he says?


They're good dampers, really firm and made properly but they can't solve the fact Morgan got the damper instalation 90 degrees out. In my case they were also poorly sized, Monty has the excellent BCC anti-tramp springs and a set of lowering blocks which also put the axle and wheels central in the wheel arches, all this is fine but the Morgan suspension specialist who sold me the Bilsteins neglected to tell me I needed to raise the top damper mounts. After a number of failures I quized the the supplier and he casually said..

"Oh yeah, I had the same issue so I had to raise my damper mounts", he then sent me the following image:



It's shame he did'nt share the above with me when he sold me the dampers


I couldn't agree more, and in my humble oppinion the way Morgan chose incline the dampers on their conversion isn't great either. While turning the damper eylets by 90 degrees is relitively easy and will be a big improvement, I don't think it'll deliver the full answer so I've designed these brackets that will be welded to Monty's axle.



With these ones being welded to the hoop.



A set of Protech coil overs with 75lb springs will then be installed between them.



The setup will give both damping and ride height adjustment, fitted as shown below they will follow the correct orientation of the Rutherford type setup and allowing the axle to swing up and back as the leaf sping eylet to eylet measurement extends under compression.



I also have great respect for Roger's spring assisters, he clearly studied one of the key issues with our rear suspension, and came up with a clever solution. I like the way they essentially give the leaves a rising progressive spring rate, using rubber cones follows the good work of Sir Alec Moulton who was somewhat of a genious in my book.

I've only held off fitting Roger's spring assisters so far because I want to test my own ideas in stages to measure their effectiveness or otherwise.

Dave, I have to take my hat off to you…

Your relentless drive to wring every drop of performance out of Monty is super impressive

Very interesting, I'm assuming it's your chassis in the pictures if so I note you have at least one new tyre on the rear, have you gone with the slightly taller tyre fitted as standard to the Plus 4 sport from to new, to increase ground clearance?

Cheers Rog, and merry Christmat to you

TBH it's all just a daft distraction to what life throws at us all eventually, I'm actually at risk of running too many Monty projects at once, but now is the time to get the jobs done while the weather is not that great.

So in addition to a few rear suspension experiments discussed in this thread, my latest hairbrain horsewower improving scheme includes this fully ported cylinder head from AL Develolments who are the masters at porting the Duratec.







Monty also goes from his current Newman Phase 2 cams, to a set of Newman Phase 3's.





After fitting the head and carefully dialing in the cams with a DTI to avoid any 'valves meet pistons' mishaps, I should have concluded my mapping work and put Monty back on the same dyno at Surrey Rolling Road by mid March. Even after some ignition timing changes Monty refused to give more than 180hp, but he does have an amazingly broad spread of torque while still delivering outstanding everyday drivability.

I should probably stop tuning but as we know 'power is all corrupting' and I remain determined to make over 200hp, this while stubonly avoiding going down the ITB route. Fitting ITBs may come eventually, and with them Monty would easily hit 235hp plus with the new head and cams. However, I absolutely love my Fusion Fabrications long runner inlet and the mid range punch it gives.

The new target is really just another crack at my old target of 210hp while retaining Monty's pussy cat town manners. I'll pop the results up as an addition to my previous 'Monty Goes to the Dyno' post here:

https://www.talkmorgan.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/795604/1

Wish me luck, Dave

Boo, photos did'nt work again

I'll have another crack at uploading them tomorrow chaps

Use TMimg so simple.