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Originally Posted by SpitfireS,May 16 2007, 02:42 PM
All the spacer does IMO is change the place inside the bucket where the spider bearings are toughing.
It's the angle between axle and bucket that determines the amount of travel or movement of the spider bearings inside the bucket.
The spacer moves the bucket outwards but does not change the angle of the axle in relation to the bucket.
I hope this is all in proper technical English
LOL, we're not going to worry about proper technical terms in this thread.
Do you see that the designed in range of movement of the balls in the cup is not exceeded at any suspension position?
We have been told that it does, and what we have been told turns out to be untrue. Does it not?
heres what i know about half shafts. on FWD cars if you take them apart (and i would and am assuming the RWD cars with independent axles use the same type of half shafts) they have, lets think about a cup and inside that cup it has 3 slots that the solid portion of the axle slides into. that has mounted on the ends of it 3 bearings. that bearings allow the sold shaft to articulate inside the cup and in and out. now when installing a hald shaft you have to be careful to not pull the cup end away from the (axle) shaft as it will pull it out of the cup. if you think about it during assembly it would be impossible to assemble a cv shaft with a "stop shoulder" inside the cup as you could never get it together...
at anyrate here is what i have to say on the spacer subject. i never thought about it in this respect prior to this thread but they really dont make sense now that some light has been shined...if you disassemble the tension portion of the rear axle so it can move up and down to the designed limits it should never pull the axle out of the cup. therefore if you lower your car it shouldnt change the way it performs. but as was stated it will ride in a different portion of the cup. the ONLY thing i can think of is that the closer it gets to the end of the cup (the lower the car gets) the weaker it will get and in high horsepower applications or someone who driver spirited like myself this "could" lead to premature failure. obviously the reason for that is the cup is weaker around the edges. i do not now see the benefits of adding a spacer. infact i could actually see that as bottoming out the axle shaft inside the cup itself as you have now added a length to the half shaft. basically like putting the wrong length axle in. i do believe they are designed with a "cusion" obviously honda would not want there to be only 1mm of cusion if someone were to bottom out the suspension (on a stock ride height) as it would potentially bottom the axle in the cup in daily driving. so the theory of 10mm or so inside as a cusion sounds like thats a possiblity. therefor with that adding the spacer would take up the cusion and potentially cause the axle to bottom out.
these are my thought. a little random but i hope they help.
Your thinking seems clear to me. I thought about throwing in some comments about CV joints on FWD/AWD cars, but decided that it would be better to keep this as simple as possible.
Fact is, every car that has independent suspension and CV joints has the same kind of movement the S2000 has. Some have more, some have less, but they all have it. We've run 600 WHP trough the CV joints of a SLAMMED R-33 GTR, and lots of outer high powered packages that were dropped, and we have NEVER needed spacers. Honda is retarded if they did not design the CV joints to be more than strong enough throughout their entire operating range, and they simply are not that dumb.
To make it simple for those who want to be faithful to the produce we should only have to look at ONE THING. I'm runnin a 1" drop, and very close to 300 WHP, autocrossing, tracking, doing burnouts, donuts, you name it, and after 24,000 miles my CV joints are just fine. If I don't need them to save my joints they you don't need them to save yours. The technical reasons have been expalined in my first post, but the proof is in all the lowered cars that have not had problems. If my CV joints had were working in a degraded state due to the lowering they'd have been trashed long ago, and there is no theory to explain the need for the spacers that doesn't fall apart under close examination. That's really the bottom line here.
Unless they give insurance against problems related to wear patterns, as XViper and others have suggested (an idea that would require exact spacer thicknesses for each degree of drop) then the spacers are useless.
Of course lots of mods are useless, and that doesn't keep people from buying them. I have no reason to believe that the spacers do any harm (as long as they're not so thick as to do what their makers incorrectly claim that lowering does).
Originally Posted by duff0000,May 16 2007, 02:56 PM
Thats how I felt. No one really eloborated on how they actually help the half shafts from stress. If someone has exact technical information on how it helps and why, id be glad to buy a set.
Well, I've done the best I can to elaborate on the way the CV joints actually work, and the factors that limit their working range, and the spacers end up looking like snake oil, so unless someone has a new theory of operation I think the matter is settled.
I'd be in line to buy a set too (and was considering it until I figured all this out) if there were some reason to believe that they'd actually do any good. At this point everything I know tells me they're just another way to part a fool from his money.
Does anyone other than me wonder why any of the manufacturers aren't defending their spacer's and theories here? I have a theory about that too, but it's just a theory, so I'll keep it to myself.
pic for that cause....All a spacer does is move the bucket outward on the tripod with the 3 rollers. In other words, they put the 3 rollers deeper in the bucket.
In theory, IF you had a pitted bucket, the spacer would solve the problem by moving the bucket to a spot that is not pitted.
They don't, in my opinion, do anything beneficial. I think I've seen somewhere that states they move the entire axle outward. This is not the case, as the only thing that could possibly push the axle outward is the AIR GAP (pressure in the boot).
Anyone who has built an axle correctly knows you have to burp the air from the boot to acheive the correct length.
Originally Posted by Billman250,May 16 2007, 04:50 PM
pic for that cause....All a spacer does is move the bucket outward on the tripod with the 3 rollers. In other words, they put the 3 rollers deeper in the bucket.
In theory, IF you had a pitted bucket, the spacer would solve the problem by moving the bucket to a spot that is not pitted.
They don't, in my opinion, do anything beneficial. I think I've seen somewhere that states they move the entire axle outward. This is not the case, as the only thing that could possibly push the axle outward is the AIR GAP (pressure in the boot).
Anyone who has built an axle correctly knows you have to burp the air from the boot to acheive the correct length.
Hi Bill,
I was going to PM you and discuss this before starting the thread, but after thinking about it enough, and talking to XViper, I realized we'd all be on the same page.
Thanks for chiming in. It's time we explain this to the people who are having problems figuring it out. As it see it, it's not exactly rocket science.
I have to believe that even the vendors win when we have a better understanding of what works and what doesn't (and why).
05-16-2007, 01:03 PM
