I fully expect people to be skeptical of this method, especially since no one has ever taught it in the r/c world as far as I know. Even if you are a skeptic, you have nothing to lose by trying this. If you don't like it, you can go back to your way of doing things. I'm not selling anything and have nothing to gain by this. The worst that can happen is that I look like an idiot and so does everyone tuning real race cars. I'm not to concerned about looking bad though!

This is a technique that must be done in a certain order. Don't second guess things and don't try to do things out of order. One step at a time. That's how you know what works and how.

Shock collars will have a slight effect on spring rate as you are tightening the springs as you move the collars down or up with the rate being affected more and more with the springs getting tightened. What happens if you get the collars all they way down and get a decent spring rate but then your ride height is far too high? What then? Do you then use shock travel limiters to hold it back down which would ultimately hurt you on jumps? What happens if you have them as loose as possible and it's nice but your ride height is now on the ground? Do you then find a way to mount the top of the shock lower and hence limit suspension travel? Forget what you know about the shock collars and their effect on the springs. Use them only to determine your ride height and rely on the springs themselves to determine the rate. This way you don't need to use other bandaid solutions to fix other problems. Too many setups and bandaid on top of bandaid.

We've all been taught that shock mounting location is important and that different mounting locations have different effects on handling. They do. Don't think they don't. I'm not saying to throw that knowledge out the door. However you must maintain balance when utilizing any location.

If you only have 1 full set of springs, you may only find one mounting location for your shocks that achieves balances, assuming you find that balance at all. Not every spring combo can result in balance regardless of location. If you have only 1 set of springs, you must obtain balance first and foremost.

If you have a full set of spring options available to you, you may have several combinations that end up in balance. You just have to figure out what these mounting locations would be for each combo and then determine which one works best for you. If you want to run your shocks all the way out on the arms and all the way in on the shock towers, that's fine. Find a spring combination that achieves frequency balance with this location. If you can't find a combo that balances, don't use these locations. Hopefully that clears that up a bit.

Shock oil is not to be used as a compensation for spring rate deficiency. They are 2 independent things that should be allowed to do their jobs as intended. If you move a shock over but leave the same springs (you probably shouldn't though), you don't just change your shock oil to compensate in any way.

In the old days we'd run the upper links as long as we could and then leave them alone. We usually only had 1 or 2 spring options, and a couple of different shock piston options. We'd run the shocks all the way out on the bottom and all the way in on top. Why? It's what others were doing and said to do. They were typically faster so they must be right. Then from there we'd constantly adjust the shock collars and shock oil weights. It seemed like no matter what you did, it improved one thing but hurt another. That was actually true though as it was bandaid tuning. Then again I was a kid back then and didn't know any better.