What a complete wreck this car was when I stripped it down - I can only assume that it had been parked in someone’s front garden for a number of years on a patch of overgrown and very damp weeds - the picture below will give you some idea.

As you can see there is a fairly liberal coating of surface rust on just about everything - thankfully once it had been stripped and ground off it clean up without too much corrosion but it did take a fair bit of hard graft.

The back end needed a lot of work - the old Capri cart springs had rusted solid so rather than mess about trying to restore it I decided to convert the back end to a 5 link system - Its quite a lot of work, as can be seen in the picture below.

Again the surface rust can also be seen on the main chassis rail - The 5 link consists of 4 trailing links and a Panhard rod arrangement - the Panhard runs at a bit of an angle which is not ideal, if it gives any peculiar handling I will lower the chassis pick-up.

The reason for the 5 link was also to achieve a lot lower stance with the car to loose the off-roader look of the gaps in the wheel arches. Typically the car has a ground clearance of about 7 inches and this will be reduced by the suspension mod’s to around 5 which gives a purposeful look as well as the advantages of the lower centre of gravity. Still as it will have a properly functioning and solidly located suspension system its going to be much better than the cruddy system that was ripped off.

You can see the first attempt at the front suspension on the introduction page to the S4 below is the latest and hopefully final version. The first try used the standard Dutton set-up with the Dutton upper wishbone and an Escort lower TCA - this system uses the modified Escort McPherson strut - I used as Capri strut as the stub axle is higher on the strut effectively lowering the car by and inch - trouble is that if you want the car really low and still want some suspension the TCA starts to lock up as the ball joint gets to the end of its travel - not good - the Capri strut gives you more movement than the Escort strut but not enough for me.

The above system uses a Cortina MK3/4 upright with two bespoke wishbones the upper wishbone being adjustable via a rose joint - This will be changed in tine to a wishbone using a Transit Track rod end - These are standard on the likes of Westfield / Locost - Originally the shocker was mounted on the same little tower as the previous system and the shocker mounted on top of the lower wishbone instead of below - unfortunately the shocker fouled the upper wishbone in this layout so it had to be changed to what you see above.

You can also just make out the rack mounts which have been modified to use angle instead of strip for the forward mounting - this is a known weak point on Dutton’s as the original mounting just from 3mm strip bends allowing the rack to move about a little in the mounts. Although you cant see them I have retained the original mountings for the Ford Escort Roll bar - In the future I hope to add an anti roll bar system.

The paint colour I chose for the chassis is a dark grey - which I mixed myself using black and light grey machinery paints. Lotus used a similar but lighter grey. It goes back to aircraft and racecar practice, as cracks in the grey colour are easier to spot.

Well this is the latest modification to the on going saga that is the front suspension on the S4 – The reason for the modification was that I could not position the coil-over on the lower wishbone close enough to the ball joint to give an adequate leverage ratio, basically with the shocker positioned as it was previously – not my work I hasten to add – the shocker was just compressed to the bump stop. – However when I re-welded the lower mounting to give me the correct leverage rate the coil-over was at such an angle that there was no way it was going to operate correctly and the only way forward was to reposition the chassis rail.

This was a bit of an annoyance as it required a considerable amount of work removing parts of the engine in order to complete a full weld – The above picture was at the half way stage and below when the hard work was complete.