Originally Posted by
jag88
I was thinking that you would get less leverage on the shock. My reasoning is that if I had a, lets say, five foot long board that was hinged at one end and placed a ten pound weight at the other end and tried to lift the board up then it would be very difficult but as I slid the weight closer to the hinge pin it would become easier because of the increased leverage (?).
I'm not real sure he this relates to having the shock more or less vertical to the arm?
As for your comment, moving the bottom inwards or outwards on the arm does change the leverage. That's why you change spring rates to adjust. Once you understand that a stiffer spring is needed on a shock mounted closer in to maintain the same wheel rate as a shock that is mounted further out, actual shock location really becomes irrelevant as long as you have the spring rate you need. We really don't need long rear shocks with shorter front shocks. If we mounted the rear shocks at the same location relative to the hinge pins as the fronts do, we could have the same shorter shocks at the rear. We'd just need a stiffer spring to compensate. This would actually be a preferable scenario since we could get the rear center of gravity down and get the rear shock tower out from in front of the rear wing.