I'm still building my kit car on my old 86 fiero and have lengthened the a-arms, but started wondering about what other options there are out there. I don't want to buy a $2k aftermarket kit. I want to find a gm car that I can take the a-arms, spindles, hubs, brakes, etc and fab to fit. Ideas??

Good question, nothing comes to mind as to an answer. The Held sport (now West Shore Fabricators?) has longer arms available, proven design and quality.....might be $$ well spend in the long view.

Hey OJD!
I don't want to buy an aftermarket. I want to take an old donor car (86 vette or camaro) and weld contact point to the fiero frame to make it work. There has to be someone here that has tried something like this before. If not, I will try it out and let you know how it works I guess, I need to find out the dimensions for the 86 fiero SE front a-arms and those of the vette and camaro. This would fix sooooo many things. Bigger brakes, bearings, hubs, etc. Plus, old vette parts and especially camaro are way cheap are here.

Mark,

How much width increase do you need for your kit? Reason I ask is I have a 3.75"-4" stretched 84-87 custom rear suspension setup I was using on my 355 project. I drew out how to make them with an explanation document for the kitcar guys but I am also selling the setup as I don't need the really wide setup any more. I can send you the info if you like.

You can pm me or drop over to Madmechanics site and you can see how I built the suspension.

Good luck
Don

Hey Don,
Thanks for the offer. I need 2 1/4 on the front and 2 1/2 on the rear with Z06 rims. I will be ordering some Motegi rims with deeper offsets, so I will not know until I get them, what the new measurements need to be. Out of curiousity, how much do you want for your system? any pics of it?

Mram10;

Not sure where Mark came from in the previous post. Autocorrect I guess.....

I went back to my build thread on MadMechanics and saw that all my old pics in the build process I did we're not transferred over during one of Ari's server moves.

I did get the drawings I made for how I built the control arms though. Below. The rears were very easy to build really. I agree with Bloozberry and his analysis of the geometry changes when extending but I wasn't planning on doing heavy driving with this vehicle so I was ok with the extended control arms vs redesigning the rear suspension.

I was looking for $600 for the control arms, shock tower to hub extensions and axles. Axles alone were over $500 when I got them and they are guaranteed up to 400hp by the builder.

A quick description of what I did.

Mount hub to wheel and place in the wheel well where you want it.
Measure from a known reference point, like front control arm mount point from frame to hub ball joint mount


Get both the the distance along the frame from known point and distance out to the hub.


Lay out the frame mount points and hub ball joint location on a flat surface and then start constructing the control arm to connect the three points. I used 1.25 tubing and also adjustable pivots so I could adjust final location in wheel well.


I also moved my strut tower mount outward toward the upper frame so I would retain the stock geometry of the strut movement as much as possible.


This what I have done on my suspension widening and, again, it is not hard to do. Just make sure you get the control arms welded by a pro if you are not really good at it as well. I had all my welding done by a local welder as my life is worth more than a few bucks.....

If you want more pics, pm me your email address and I can send them along.

Cheers
Don

I went the simpler way of just putting deeper offset wheels on 2 of my kits. I added 2" to front and 4" to rears. This was for my Ferrari and Lambo kits. I never had any handling or tire issues at all and never had a wheel bearing problem in 100,000 miles. I wont use adapters at all. Both were custom made authentic looking Ferrari and Lambo wheels (other than deeper offset).