- Piers is asking, you mentioned that when setting up the coilovers that if the spring
is preloaded it is not a problem and will not affect the spring rate.
What if it's the other way around and the spring isn't preloaded at all, it is loose on
the shock until the weight of the car is applied?
Yeah that's really great that you brought that question up 'cause that's something that comes
up a lot.
So what Piers is asking there is, I'll just reassemble everything here.
So let's say you've got the spring platform wound down, so let's say for this particular,
obviously your ride height and your spring setup is determined on the free length of
your spring, it's also obviously on the rate of the spring and there's all sorts of different
combinations of when you go to buy an aftermarket spring or buy different rates
of springs, you always get an option on the free length and on the rate itself.
So depending on how that package is in your particular coilover, this is how you can
end up in the situation that Piers is talking about.
So let's say you've got your ride height and your ride height seat, you're happy
with everything with the lower mount, the ride height's perfect, you're happy
with the position of your suspension travel, where you are in your travel
at ride height but you've got the situation where the spring's loose.
That's quite a commoin situation.
There are a couple of problems with that, one is, so let's say you're cornering and
the inside wheel has got no load on it and it's off the ground or close to being
off the ground.
The problem with this being loose is that there's a huge amount of vibration and
bumps and everything going on in the car, nothing's happening smoothly.
There's the opportunity for the spring to actually jump up off its platform and get
caught on another part of the platform.
The problem with that is if it's sitting up on the edge of the platform like this and
the car comes back down on the ground, the car will have a whole lot of preload,
extra force put on that corner of the car and at some point during the lap,
it could be straight away, it could happen later, it's going to sit back down on its collar,
on its platform and at that point you're going to have a really unsettling force to the car
so you don't want that to happen, you want this to be sitting snugly on its platform
the whole time.
The other thing is when this thing is, if it can move around, it can be incredibly destructive to
your damper as well, particularly most of these dampers are usually made of aluminium body
but a steel spring, when this thing is rubbing up and down against the damper body itself,
it will very quickly chew out the damper and make a mess of it and it'll have to be
replaced pretty quickly so that's something you want to avoid.
So the way we get around this is by using something called a helper spring.
And I've actually got a prop behind me, I'll grab.
So this is what we call a helper spring, it's an incredibly soft spring so where this
spring here, there's no way I'd be able to compress that together myself, this is just
really trivially soft.
The purpose of the helper spring and again these are available from all sorts of different
spring manufacturers, different free lengths, different rates, different diameters to suit
your situation.
We just use helper springs to keep the spring in place when we have a situation where we
have an uncaptured spring like we do here.
So the idea is there's a little locating collar that I don't have with me right now but
essentially it gets stacked on top of here and there's a little collar that just keeps the
springs aligned with each other so they can't move sideways with respect to
each other and the idea is that now you've got this new stack on your damper and
the purpose is here that it's so soft that when the car goes back down on the ground
after you've done your setup or when the car goes on the ground in general,
it doesn't have any appreciable effect on the dynamics of the car because it's so soft
that it's compressed instantly under the car's weight.
But the idea here is it just locates the spring and just stops it from rattling
around and means that it stops you having an uncaptured spring.
So that's what we use helper springs for, in that situation where you've got an
uncaptured loose spring sitting on the coilover so hopefully Piers that answered
your question and helper springs is what you want to look for if you're going to
solve that problem.
If you like free stuff and you'd like to learn more about optimising
the performance and handling of your car on the racetrack, as well as improving your
skills behind the wheel, then we've got a great deal for you.
Click the link in the description to this video to claim your free spot to our next
live lesson.
You're guaranteed to learn a lot and you'll have a chance to ask questions which we'll
be answering live.
Remember it's 100% free so click the link to claim your spot.