Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Mike Kojima's Nitto Tyres Sentra Spec V Racecar aka Dog III - Suspension

As promised here are the hardcore porn stuff from Mike Kojima's monster. Photos and tech explanations reproduced with consent from Mike Kojima from his SR20 forum postings. I've added some of my explanations where possible to make understanding easier. Let's start with the suspension..

Aluminum strut bar, Modifed shock towers with camber caster plates and remote reservoirs for the KW Struts/shocks

Andrew - The N16/B15's front suspension strut towers cannot easily accept a camber plate top mount and needs to be cut and a new top rewelded. Not a bolt-on job. Detail explanation in Nitto Tire's blog.

Front KW strut assembly complete with remote reservoir and top camber castor plate. Andrew - And NO.. these are the real deal racing struts and not some Taiwanese or Bolehland knockoffs. You can buy several sets of Tein Super Streets for one of these. The KW damper is 3-way adjustable. The top elongated hole/slot on the strut lower mount means further camber fine tuning.

The rears

Front suspension with adjustable wheelbase, caster, camber, kingpin inclination angle, bumpsteer and roll center. I wanted to make the anti dive adjustable too, but ran out of time, maybe later in the development cycle. Making an adjustable front swaybar was a bitch in this car, see lower endlink mount on the bottom of the control arm, and slot in arm for the endlink. The bar has minimal endlink angularity though. Andrew - anti swaybar is also known as an anti-roll bar. Tie-rod, arb and front lower arm outer pivot (the part where it connects to the hub/upright) are spherical bearing items. Other bushes are from Superpro.

Adjustable rear panhard rod that gets rid of the stock Scott-Russell linkage, roll center height is adjustable via panhard rod. Andrew - the panhard rod assembly is custom fabricated. Again you can't simply buy these parts aftermarket and bolt-on.

Speedway Engineering rear antiswaybar with remotes for KW Shocks. Andrew - anti-roll bar stiffness is adjustable via the holes in the blade. The closer the hole to the arb the stiffer! Like the Nissan N15 DTC racecar the anti-roll bar goes through the spare tyre well

More hardcore porn stuff and "upskirt" shots to follow. Who wanna be the first to mod the Slowtra to similar Supertra levels?