OK, well I can see we have a lot of work to do.
First of all HTF do you KNOW that you dont want leaf springs?
- Found the limits of articulation yet?
- Hammered half a dozen bump stops into submission, perhaps?
- Which of the leaf springs limitations have you actually reached?
BTW those questions are retorical - that means I dont need to know the answers.
Sounds to me like you have some 'mates' who want you to have what they thing is best - not necesserily what you need, or may be best for you.
If you dont want a leaf srpung landie - get rid now and go buy a coiler, becouse you are starting from the wrong place.
Dont wast your time faffing about tyrying to build a Hybrid. Its a BIG job to do one and an even bigger one to do it right. And if you dont even know what the pro's and cons between a leaf and a coil are, then you sure as f**K aint going to know how best to set up a hybrid suspension system!
And I dont have the patience to sit here and try and tell you. If you go look on my web-site theres a pretty good article on the subject of suspension upgrades, and if you trawl through the 4x4 web-sites, you should be able to find the answers to any other questions you might have on the topic.
Right. Base line. A Series 3 Land rover is a damn good all round package. And I can almost garantee that off road, the biggest improvement you can make to yours will be the driver!
No dis-respect intended, but as a newbie, its almost certain that a stock Series three in a reasonably well fettles state will have more off-road capability than you can usefully exploit, and are likely to be able to usefully exploit for a very long time.
The same could be said of a stock 90 on coil springs, but the advantages of those are often exagerated and they have their own dissadvantages that mean the likelyhood of you getting yourself into a situation you cant get out of in either are about equal.
So dont dismiss the leaf spring set up too fast. After all, it has had the advantage of about two milenia of development that coild springs haven't!
You say for 'general off-roading' - I shall assume by that you mean more challenging green laning, and Pay&Play days.
For competition, at the one end you have 'Road Taxed Vehicle' or RTV Trails or 'Cross Country Vehicle' or CCV trials.
Trials is for precision driving through and over tight obsticles in a marked section. Demands in Trials are for manouverability and slow speed control more than anything. Soft suspension and reasonable articulation tend to be the more important influences on the suspension.
At the other end, you have comp safari, or hill rally. Like scrambling in 4x4's. Power and speed are the primary consideration here, you want to go fast. Obsticles aren't so demanding, but they are likely to be big, and you could be hitting them at maybe 70mph rather than 7!
Suspension travel and bump control tend to be the primary influences in the set up.
A stock set up is a compromise between the two, and not a bad one.
Now, those are the kind of reasons you might want to move away from a stock suspension set up, for performance reasons. However, a lot of suspension mods are made not for suspension performance but for clerance.
Lift the body away from the axles and you improve your approach, breakout and departure angles. Put simply, you can go over a steeper bump before the front bumper hits it, the chassis grinds on it, or the rear cross member digs in.
Next, lift the suspension and you can get bigger wheels under the wheel arches, and bigger wheels lift the axles further away from the ground, so thay can go over bigger bumps without the diff casing getting hammered.
Problem with this is that the centre of gravity is raised, and the thing is more likely to tip over on a side slop, and will roll horendousely through corners.
Lifts also rarely improve articulation, but sometimes offer more travel - Ie they tend more towards a comp-safari set up than a trials one.
Parabolics on an S3 give about a 2" lift. Add 750 size tyres to a SWB that should have 600's and you gat about another 1 1/2". And that, realistically is plenty to improve clerance angles and get more axle clerance, without pushing the CofG too high.
Practically that is about as far as I'd say is 'reasonable' to go with an S3 set up. You can go further with revolvers, or z-links, and all told a well developed 'extreme leaf' is probably a damn site more useful than a typical 'kit' coiler set up, but in either case, neither has much purpose until you have actually reached the limits of the stock set up.
And even then, a better driver will get more out of a leaf sprung set up than a typical driver will out of a coiler.
And, starting out on leafs is a good way to get good. The coilers have the complience amd travel that the leafers lack, but the leafers have a directness and 'feel' that gives you a lot more feedback to let you know what the wheels are doing, that can make them a lot easier to get to grips with.
At the end of the day, you will do what you want, but I strongly suggest that you actually do some research and dont just believe what your 'mates' blithely tell you and accept it as gospal.
Hi 
