Spring Guide Problem

Snapped in half spring guides, passenger side

After some constant clunking, and random snap oversteer, I was starting to wonder exactly what was going on with the car. It was when John had said at the last race, "It just doesn't feel right." that it made me begin to worry. After some inspecting of everything in the rear, low and behold, I found the culprit!

Passenger side, completely destroyed

Driver side, getting chewed up

It looks like the spring guides that we had gotten for the helper springs were snapped in two pieces, causing the springs to move around a lot more than they should. Check out the picture above of the passenger side, followed by how the driver side was starting to get gouged up as well.

What seems to have caused this to happen was that the helper springs needed to be ontop of the main spring, and not on the bottom. What was happening is that when the shock compressed, the shock adjuster collar was jabbing into the spring guide, which eventually it just chewed away at it until it snapped.

Gorgeous new aluminum spring guides!

Thanks to John, he cooked up some aluminum spring guides that were made to fit our application better, and were a lot stronger than the simple delrin pieces we had. It definitely was a good lesson in terms of where and how to place helper springs in a car because I honestly didn't even think about the possibility of that happening when the shock was compressed. Guess we'll have to see how the car feels this weekend at the upcoming Renegade Miata event, so stay tuned!