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Fabricating the Rear Cantilever Suspension

Contributed by: Enginebasics.com

So this is the part where the build will take an interesting turn.  I never thought about fabricating such an ornate rear suspension.  I am all about the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) mentality when it comes to fabrication and engineering things, but I just couldn’t see another way of doing the suspension without having to change and fab a lot of things on the lower A-arms and changing a lot of the mounting points on the car.  By going to a cantilever suspension I was able to use the factory shock mount on the spindle and have all of the fabrication of mounts be much simpler and in an area of the car that was much easer to get to.  There are many reasons why a cantilever design is used on exotic cars and racecars, but for this build the number one reason was that it would allow me to adjust the height of the car independently from playing with the coil-over.  Now a coil-over shock will do this as well, but it requires you to get in there with your wrenches and move the spring perch setting.  With this design I can just adjust the length of the cantilever rod and I got it.  I was going to have to go to a coil-over design shock anyway since I would have no idea about spring rates or what the height would be since the entire rear was changed.  I had to do a lot of trial and error switching out springs and heights of springs on the front till it was right, and hopefully I can avoid that all now in the rear.  Plus lets face it, it just looks awesome.

I started by welding a bar across the top of the strut towers to support the coil-overs.

Then fabricated the mounts to hold the coil overs and to hold the rocker arm.

With the suspension moved out of the wheel well this also gave me tons of room to work and fabricate sub frame mounts to really make sure the sub frame was tied to the structure of the car properly.  I am excited to see if this suspension works and have fun tuning it in.

Finally with the sub frame mounts all tacked in and the suspension mounts all tacked in we can sit the car down for the first time on its own weight. It is only sitting down on its weight in the rear, as the front is still up on jackstands hence the car looks like it is a 4x4 rally civic. Don't worry as it will look perfectly normal once the car is put down on its full weight front and rear.