Weightshifting a CRX

B

B Schley

New member
Question for all you Crx guys out there. We are scaling our 1990 Crx. As the car sits on the scales in a neutral stance the front left corner is heavy. Any suggestion on how to shift the weight a little more to the right front side? The rear is basically neutral. Thanks for the help.
--Bill
 
You cannot "shift-weight" in IT--that would involve the movement of components to other areas of the car. However, as pointed out above, you can "corner weight", meaning you get the diagnol weight totals the same (or biased as you want)by raising or lowering the ride heights at each corner.

Cheers.
 
It helped me when I first started doing cornerweighting to think of a four-legged table. If you make one leg shorter, it leaves its two neighbors longer and carrying more of the table's weight.

Since table legs have a VERY high spring rate
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the effect is magnified but the same process works on your car. If you make one "leg" shorter by lowering its ride height, static weight gets jacked onto the two wheels next to it - onto that diagonal.

Conversely, if you make a "leg" longer by raising its ride height, weight is jacked onto it and its buddy diagonally across the car.

I know next to nothing about CRXen but seem to remember that they have torsion bars...? If that's the case, they might be splined in a way that allows you to re-align them at different ride heights. We had "old-school" struts on the front of the Renault Cup cars - non-height-adjustable - but could get the corner weights exactly where we wanted them by diddling the rear torsion bars.

They were SO gutless, by the way, that a few percentage points of of diagonal bias made a measurable difference in lap times...

K
 
Kirk, I think you are thinking about the 3rd gen Civic/CRX with the Torsion setup. This one is a '90 (4th gen) that has A-arms and a coil-over setup. Since it is quite hard to balance the front of most FWD cars, I bias my front setup so that the left side is 1/2" higher than the right. Our local track has 80% right hand corners and that is how I set the car up. I'll sacrifice a little handling for those 3 left hand corners (1 of them a hairpin). This gets the weight a little more even.

BTW, Honda originally designed this car to be a right driver with the heavy engine biased on the left side. With a 200lb driver on the right side, the car is quite balanced.
 
Bill
Give me a call. Too long a process to explain here.
414 423-0867 or talk to me at the open house on Sunday at David Hobbs. I hope you guys are bringing your hotrod to Annual Tech.
 
Mike-
We are going to be at Hobbs on Sunday. This "hot rod" is the car we put together for my cousin Emily. We'll see you there, and I look forward to talking about Crx corner weights all day.

--Bill
 
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