Several good points, thanks. And yes I do know driver mod is important, always trying to work on this, I still consider myself a noob.
Mine are tender springs, 150lb and 2" long. I will have to look, but I'm pretty sure the tenders are about completely compressed when the car weight is applied. The main springs in back are 700, so in comparison they will hardly compress at all. The front has less weight and only 550 mains, so they are probably not quite compressed in front. I will get under the car and check this.
I only have a front swaybar, and the endlinks aren't adjustable
So I can't remove the preload on that. But hopefully left/right are about the same height so there shouldn't be much preload.
As far as front/rear weight, that is not something I can easily adjust. There is not separate adjustment for height and preload, and I need to maintain a 10mm rake front to rear (or so everyone says is necessary on these cars). I think the only thing I can shoot for is even cross weight, and use the shocks/swaybar/camber etc for tuning under/over steer.
Edit: Oh yea, I'm in Iowa, hopefully my friend has time next weekend for a corner balance, or worst case I go to the Lotus shop in KC.
Edit #2: So, in my extremely accurate drunk calculations, I have 400 lbs front and 600 lbs rear on each corner for the car with me in it. Left will be more than right but let's ignore that.
2in * 150 lbs/in for the tender = 300lbs fully compressed (max, because the compressed spring is probably .5" so you only get 1.5" of compression, probably closer to 225-235 lbs total weight absorbed)
Rear spring = 700lb/in. Rear spring would compress .86" without a tender. Wouldn't the tender have to fully compress with 600 lbs on it? There is only 2" of travel with 4 times the weight per inch, and the main spring is compressing less than an inch. Is this ricer math? Or perhaps I need to re-take physics for inline springs and how they interact with each other.
Why isn't there a cool shockwave/flash application on the internet where you can plug in two inline spring rates/lengths and load weight to determine what happens?
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