From the Rolls-Royce experimental archive: a quarter of a million communications from Rolls-Royce, 1906 to 1960's. Documents from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation (SHRMF).
Suspension tuning, shock absorber loads, and ride comfort across various car models.
| Identifier | ExFiles\Box 11\3\ 03-page288 | |
| Date | 14th November 1930 guessed | |
| -2- suspension. We are really very pleased with the results we obtained on Sg{Arthur F. Sidgreaves - MD}'s car, the most surprising thing being that the car was quite nice to drive even with 5" front and 10" rear deflection. The secret seems to be to have reasonably high shock absorber loads and we believe it is necessary to put up with a certain amount of discomfort in the way of hard riding at low speeds in the front seats in order to make the car controllable with the desirable rear spring deflection. We are waiting for Sg{Arthur F. Sidgreaves - MD}'s opinion on this car as of course conditions around London are much more severe for pitching etc., than we can get here. We are treating the 25HP. car 18-G4 in the same way and have certainly improved its riding and controllability enormously from the state in which we took it to W.W., but we are not satisfied that we have approached the comfort which we can get on the Phantom ll yet. As a matter of fact, taling over springing complaints with the Repair Dept., they state that they have only had about two cases where they could not satisfy a customer by fitting springs which gave the correct buffer clearance, but we feel that this is more of a tribute to the customers than the car. We shall be very interested to hear whether you can confirm our results on 25-EX. in America. The actual damper loads we used were 90 lbs. up and 100 lbs. down in the front with one .023 hole in the high pressure valve. 70 lbs. up and down rear with no holes in the valves. | ||