What do struts actually do? It's the spring that controls the ride of the car and how low the car is to the ground.

So what else needs to be done for a properly working suspension?

Newb post, sorry.

Damping

They keep the oscillations in your car's springs to a minimum/not at all. With out them you'd feel more like a boat out on the water.
That's why when you push on your hood/trunk your car only goes up and stops and doesn't bounce like a slinky.

If it interests you, the critical damping rate is 2(km)^0.5 where k is the spring rate and m is the mass. This will kill off all oscillations as fast as possible.

Ahhh, thanks for the information.

So the struts basically push the body away from the wheels to keep the springs from being too bouncy?

straight from the faqs

Event wrote:The struts are the mainstay of mechanical suspension. They control the motion of the spring. The spring is there to help the car stay suspended, while the strut is to control the smoothness. Remember the POGO stick from childhood. It was fun cause you kept bouncing, but imagine how hard it would have been if pressurized oil was inside and controlled motion. It would have sucked then, but now with a car its what you look for. CONTROL…

bascially the springs are what control the height of the car. theres 2 different types of springs, linear and progressive. different springs have different spring rates. the struts job is to control the spring. when you hit a bump, the spring compresses. as it comes back down, the strut is there to control the damping so you dont feel the spring. if your struts were blown, youd feel everything. hence the pogo stick reference event was talking about.

also with adjustable stuts it helps control the transition of weight.

Springs control static weight transission and height. Swaybars help the car balance left to right transisions. Struts can help to control the rate of weight transision when adjustable, and also cancel out spring oscillation when compressing and decompressing when your going over bumps etc....


-Chris

next time read the suspension faq fag

2 years ago we had this Jetta on our new car lot, someone came at nigh and stole the rear shocks off of it (its not like out strut inside the spring setup, the shock is seperate and all mounting bolts are on the outside of the vehicle, you can just jack it up and take them hahahah) anyways one of the guys pulled the car in, just for the fun of it he was cruisin and lightly taped the brakes over and over in the same rythem, it bounced so bad the rear tires got a couple inches of air off the ground, it was insane, never seen anythign like that. In a perfect wold springs and strurs/shocks wouldn't be nessesary, you could mount the wheels solid to the from, but, in real life roads are full of uneven potholes rough streets. So the wheels have to be able to kinda flex compared to the body. Picture jumping off a roof and landing on your feet with your knees locked, there would be so much shock all kinds of @!#$ would break, same thing when your 3000 lb car hits a rough spot in the road. So the wheels need to be able to move up and down to to go right over the uneveness without braking @!#$, which is why there are contol amrs, gives the wheels a pivot point to go up and down and ball joints so the wheel can move up without rotating inward (negative camber style) so keep the car form falling onto the control arms there are springs, the springs hold the car up and allow bumps to puch the wheel up. The shocks work to keep the springs from doing what they want picture droping a wad of play-doh compared to droping a bouncy ball, the play-doh will hit, have a slight bounce and thats it, its at a nice standstill again, the bouncy ball would just bounce and bonce and bounce and bounce. The spring on its own is a bouncy ball, the shock/strut turns it into play-doh. steering wheeel goes down to a steering racking, coming out of the rack on both sides is inner tie rod ends, threaded onto the inners is the outer tie rod ends, which connect to the spindle, when you turn the wheel its a big solid mess of parts thats turns the wheels in and out, becayse they turn in and out this is also why strut mounts need bearings, to allow it to turn without binding up the spring and chewing up the strut mounts. The strut mounts mount the spring and strut assembly to the vehicle at the top and the bottom is mounted to the spindle.







My despecriptions are kinda vauge cause there are a ton of different types of suspension setups, but this should give you a general idea of what everything does. Hope it helps (btw I didn't proof read or spell check, its late, I'm sick, and I worked 12 hours today, if you can't read it..... to bad

Darkstars wrote:...In a perfect world springs and strurs/shocks wouldn't be nessesary...

Cuz in a perfect world, the DOT wouldn't half-arse their road construction and repairs, thus causing our heads to smack the roof every time we drive down the street.