3) The steering is scary. @mrblaine is helping walk me through dialing in the steering and he described it best as "non-linear steering response". It's not so much an issue driving slow but on faster roads with turns is when this issue really rears it's head. What's happening is that when I turn the steering wheel a little bit for the turn the Jeep only turns slightly, I then turn even more to try and get the steering response I want, and then slightly more, but then the weight transfers to the outside tire and the Jeep quickly turns way more than I'm expecting. It all happens in a fraction of a second and has had me pointed into the oncoming lane more than once. Which then results in me jerking the steering wheel in the opposite direction and veering right and left in my lane during a simple curve in the road. In my next update I'll post about how I'm going to correct this issue.
The issue with my steering is that it is unable to achieve Ackermann. This is something that I've been aware of since day 1 of the build and I knew I'd have to dial in the steering.
Thankfully today was a nice sunny day with 50F weather which made for a good day of getting out of the Jeep a bunch of times and dialing in the steering on the side of the road with a couple of trips back to the garage.
To dial in the steering I started by centering the steering wheel. Because the steering stops are perfectly set up so the knuckles, hydro, and steering box stops all hit at the same time at ride height the only way to center the steering wheel is to adjust the ride height. Ride height is adjusted by moving the preload nuts on the coilovers up or down.
I brought the toe to 0 (meaning straight; no toe in or out).
I then went for a drive on a paved dry road with lots of turns to establish a baseline. The handling was horrible due to the non-linear steering response. It was so bad I was honestly worried it wouldn't be fixable.
To get the steering to be good, I started by placing a mark on the top of the tie rod and rotated the tie rod half a turn of toe out at a time. As toe out increased the steering response became more linear. I kept increasing toe out until the steering became vague on center (similar to a dead spot I had trouble going straight but turns were fine) and then I turned the tie rod back half a turn to the sweet spot.
There was a point where I could tell that I was steering by reacting to the road because I had muscle memory from how it handled in the morning even though it was starting to handle better. I've had this Jeep since stock and I think I have so much muscle memory of how it's handled over the years. So I stopped at a gas station for a little snack and a break so I could approach the Jeep with fresh eyes again.
The sweet spot wasn't quite good enough to feel comfortable handing the keys over to Mrs Tox for an unbiased opinion so I dialed in more caster angle by shortening the upper control arm 2 rotations and went through the process again of finding the sweet spot. Pinion angle is nice but isn't a huge concern since I have locking hubs.
I got the steering dialed in to the point where I could drive and enjoy music without having constant vigilance micromanaging the steering. I found that instead of pushing myself to drive the speed limit I was now driving faster naturally because I had confidence in the steering and it was easy. I'm not sure that I found the perfect sweet spot yet because the suspension is so firm that anytime there's a bump in the road I was thrown around and I would bump the steering wheel. I'm actually pretty sore from driving all day on paved roads.
One last thing, something that I had done last month is I sent my steering box to PSC to swap out the torsion bar with their firmer .210 bar. This helped slow steering response and make high speed driving better.
It took all morning and afternoon to go through this process and was well worth the effort since my Jeep is actually starting to be fun to drive -- which I'm thankful for after putting so much hard work into it! Next up is dialing in the suspension!