What do I do with my adjustable shocks? You've bought adjustable shocks for your
drag car and now you got them and you don't exactly know what to do with them
so today we're gonna we're gonna kind of map out what you can do with the
adjustable shock what they're gonna do for you and also the different kinds of
adjustments that we offer on this particular car that I've got behind me
it's a 1964 Chevy Nova or Chevy II this is a tube chassis car and it doesn't
require a ton of front-end travel like you might see on more of a stock
suspension style drag car bracket car so you've seen a lot of the
Camaros and things like that that are more of a just a modified stock car and
they've got a ton of front-end travel coming up this car you're not gonna see
quite as much travel just the way that it's built it's a tube chassis it wasn't
built for a massive amount of front-end travel but the principles are still the
same on a real basic level you need your shocks to extend if your car comes up
like that you're transferring all that weight that might be right here sixty
percent in the front to the back tires and what we're doing is we want the
front end to come up we want the front end to rise which is where the weight
transfer is coming from once the front end has come up then we're looking at
how it's staying up a lot of cars if it's a car that can pull the wheels real
high and come flying back down you need compression valving that's going to keep
it from coming down too far and we'll get more into that as we should as we
show the cars moving but I want to talk a little bit about the different styles
of adjustable shocks that are available this is a single adjustable shock here
that is a 50/50 style shock it's simultaneously adjustable meaning that
as I turn this knob to the right it's gonna be this it's gonna change the same
amount for both directions so if I turn it up also it's really
stiff I can't move it we've got this drag race R adjustable shock this is
really popular for like a drag car it's adjusted like a 90/10 style
shock so it's really soft rebound really stiff compression that's even on zero
and you've got eighteen adjustments that you can dial it in to what you need the
next step up is the double adjustable double, two knobs
one for compression one for rebound and what you can do there is you can
tune each direction of the shock independently of the other one so if I I
pull this out for the rebound stroke and push it back in that's compression now
if I turn the rebound up it's really stiff and I can't do it so that's how
these shocks adjust on a double it's a independent fully independent adjustment
so if I change the compression valve it's not gonna affect the rebound valve
which means that in a car like a drag car like what we're going to use here
today you can tune the rebound which is how fast it comes up and then you can
tune the compression separately so if this was a car that pulled the wheels
pretty violently and sent them back down we could tune our compression valving to
just catch the car nice and soft and plan out by the end of the track
the compression valving on the Malibu in the Far Lane is too soft allowing the
front end to come down too far and popping back up because all the energy
that gets stored up in the springs now turn your attention to the Chevy II here
notice the front end rises just enough to pull the front wheels for a brief
moment then stays up as the tires come back down this is what you're after the
front should come back down to ride height by the finish line all right so
now you've seen some of the changes you can make with your front shocks and what
that actually does for the car and getting that weight transfer as a
function of getting your front end to rise up if you have any questions you
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