Teddy-2000RS

Good afternoon ladies and gents. I have come to the point in my project to sort out the solid axle swap for my Subaru Impreza. I have a 8.8 from a 95 GT that I am going to be using. As I don't want to back half the car, I am going to retain the factory style triangulated 4 link setup. The trouble I am having is deciding on what style heim joints or rod ends I am going to use. The car is going to be predominately street driven with jaunts down the strip/street when my heart desires such. I do not want to deal with clunky link ends that a lot of solid link cars have to deal with. I would like to have a joint that has a grease fitting if possible as well. Curries "johnny joint" is the closest thing I have found to what i am looking for. What are your guys thoughts or recommendations joint wise?

pdxmotorhead

The Johnny joint works very well offload on jeeps and such,, FWIW, they usually only use them on the chassis end of the arms and use solids on the axle ends to keep it from over flexing under power.. They sell a rebuild kit for the Johnny joints thats pretty easy and there are some rebuildable cartridge Heim style joints as well. I'd look at some catalogs from Dirt track suppliers, there are some very nice components out there for less money that the big brand race suppliers provide.

Good luck and post some pics as you get it wound up..

BTW also look at some of the STI (The company not Subaru) reinforcement work they do for the suspension pickup points on rally cars.. The stock ones will rip out..

Teddy-2000RS

Interesting, I didn't realize that different joints were used chassis side versus the axle sides. I've got a speedway motors catalog in my box that I will check out tonight.

I'm not using factory chassis side pick up points. Here's what I have for upper chassis plates so far. It ties the unibody rail to the multiple sections of the floor.

pdxmotorhead

Yea if you use the rubber mounted bushings at both ends you can get a lot of power deflection that isn't real repeatable, not a huge, issue on a rock crawler but I noticed it on some trophy trucks a while back that they used helms on the axles ands and the suspension guys said that was their reasoning..

I used to occasionally do Sweep on WRC events when they cam though my town.. massive fun and got to see quite a few of them up close,,
often on their sides or upside down.. Plus I was "last through: rig that closed the course to racing, so I got to run as fast as I wanted/dared...

The real factory WRX/STI cars have huge reinforcement plates wrapping the unibody where they tie in the suspension, basically they double wrap about a 12" square section at each point.. And they try and land cage tubes on the same plates to spread the shock to the chassis.

Teddy-2000RS

Post running a rally would be awesome. I would likelyend up in the brush but it would be a good time.

That's pretty much what I am doing. The cage and tube tunnel intersect right behind the locations of those plates as well as tying into the towers which are also tied to the cage.

Teddy-2000RS

I ended up with chromoly heims all the way around instead of having a rubber mounted joint. I used pretty much the same geometry as a mustang, adjusting the lengths scaled down to my car. I just need to get wheels to make it a proper roller.