Morris Minor Owners Club

My rear suspension is rather terrible...

I have fitted a marina axle, this is lowered with the Owen Burton blocks and the original dampers have been replaced with Spax telescopic's placed in a similar way to the marina with a piece of about 30x30x3mm angle fitted from one side of the car to the other (bolted to boot floor and chassis), in-front of the petrol tank acting as the top mount for the dampers.

I have fitted alloys with 205 50 R15 tyres (see photo). These do not stick out of the arches (legally OK) but just hit the inside lip bit of the arch. I have not shortened the original bump stops (as is the norm when lowering) to prevent the wheels from hitting the inside rim of the arch, leaving only a small amount of travel. The suspension unsurprisingly is pretty terrible (my girlfriend refuses to travel in the car). I have tried traveller springs but these were worse.

The ideas i have / need guidance on are:
1. I have some pre-load adjustable Bilstein coil-overs, would it be better if i fitted these in place of my current Spax dampers (the mountings should already (or can be made to) be strong enough) and there is space to fit them. I assume with these i could adjust the ride height a little and they would add to the spring rate??? would this help
2. Would it be best to save up and get some the oversize fibreglass arches (i hate doing the respray work and i think it would be hard to get the old arches off)
3. Remove the lip on the inside of the arches (angle grinder) - would this make everything too weak??
4. Cut and bend the lip up - I assume this would also weaken the arch and possibly crack the paintwork??
5. The most boring - un-lower the car??

would an anti-roll bar / anti tramp bars help??

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Luke

I would have thought more spring rate is the last thing you want. My new springs made for a very uncomfortable ride until I'd got a few miles on them and they'd softened up a bit. As for the lip it has no structural value, it can be as flimsy as you like. I would have thought anti-tramp bars would be a good idea but I doubt they would do anything for the ride, I plan to get some in the future also. I've never heard a good word spoken about anti roll bars at the rear of a minor.

Traditional answer is to 'roll the arches' - bend the lip back on itself. There is a special tool you can make for the job, or you could hammer and dolly it back.

The secret with any live axle is as much travel as possible with springs as soft as possible and dampers as soft as you can get away with........ in otherwords soft!

So you need to increase the travel, get rid of the lip on the wings.

Maximise the travel, cut down the bump stop. Then run the springs as soft as you can (remove a leaf or 2) so it doesnt bottom out all the time.

I always ran 5 leaves on the back of my Minors before I went to coilovers and a 5 link.

John

Innovator, any pictures of your set-up?

Just a few http://www.beardmorebros.co.uk/

bigginger wrote:Just a few

... million Still lovin' the site John ;)

One of my fave bookmarks too A proper inspiration.

As above - you MUST get suspension travel. Raise the car to a decent height and/or cut the bump stops down slightly, making sure the dampers have adequate travel of course - and bend in the lip.

Thanks BigG! What an awesome site.

bigginger wrote:One of my fave bookmarks too A proper inspiration.

I've just re-read the V8 kitten pages, what a loon/genius*

* delete where applicable

Good, innit...

Right i will try bending the lip in (cutting and bending?? - as advised when fitting larger mini arches), then reduce the length of the bump stops and reduce the damping on the Spax... Just need some good weather...

I would love to try the five bar link setup, but i wouldn't know where to start with measurements / mounting placements for the bars and thanks for the website, I have found it very inspiring and it was a lot of help when fitting my front coil-overs...

Thanks again

Luke

I've never heard a good word spoken about anti roll bars at the rear of a minor

Sorry, but you will now!

Makes the turn-in sharper, and makes the handling truly neutral with both front and rear roll bars fitted. It was quite noticeable when one of the standard Ital mounting clamp brackets broke on the rear axle. The axle is a normal Minor one, and I have fabricated brackets on it to take the normal Ital clamps. The bump stops have been shortened by about 1" to 1 1/2", and reshaped like the original to give a bit of progression when used.

I also have anti-tramp bars, but these don't have any effect on the handling as such, just stop the unpleasant movement when taking off quickly, especially from a right turn at a t-junction or crossroads. They probably exaggerate the restricted articulation resulting from the anti-roll bar fitment. Means the axle 'lifts' more easily, again the RH side more than the LH because of the torque reaction. Have fitted a limited slip diff (Tran-X plate type), which has sorted that out.

Going back to the original question. Lowering and softening the rear can be done in one easy move - start with a 7-leaf spring as fitted to the early cars and all travellers. Remove the bottom, smallest leaf, turn it over and fit it upside down on top of the remaining 6 leaves. Did it nearly 40 years ago, and it has worked very well ever since then!

The return lip does help to maintain the wing shape, but should be able to be rolled. Wish I had done it before fitting 185/70x13 tyres. Had no problem at all with 165x13, but the slightly wider tyres catch the lip on bump.

I have a similar set-up for the dampers, just Koni instead of Spax, works well on full 'soft' setting.

I wanted to retain the 'original' type suspension design as much a possible, and am just waiting for the opportunity to compare with Jonathan's coilover traveller some time? (See the earlier post on coilovers)