It’s confirmed the pressure needed at the contact patch changes with shock mount position. It changes the lever in the shock/link/chassis assembly.

In a vacuum, sure. If a vehicle is climbing a perfectly smooth inclined plane, then what you're saying is true. Any, and by that I mean ANY change in directionality of that surface will change the direction of load on the suspension. Gravity is always straight down, but the direction of force returned by the tire depends on the attitude and loading of that tire. If gravity acted like air pressure, we'd never fall down. Gravity, straight down; everything else, "down" is relative to the surface. We're not in a vacuum. Tilting the truck DOES change the shock angle-- even if only a matter of a few degrees-- because the axle moves through an arc. The angle wouldn't change only if the links were so long as to make the axle travel completely linear. The same goes for change of shock angle through the arc of the axle-- it's only a few degrees, but it's there. It also doesn't necessarily mean that the shock shock/spring is softer at full compression-- because while the springs are linear, the oil inside the shock is not. Emulsion shocks are going to have some amount of pack in them no matter what, so a damper is going to behave differently at full compression compared to full extension. The link and the shock work together, ALWAYS. 3-link and 4-link suspensions are composite triangles, and every angle in that triangle has a certain resistance to all outside forces. We have some degree of control over that resistance, by altering the geometry of that triangle. Were this not the case, a 1lb/in spring and a 4lb/in spring would behave the same, and leaning the shock over would have no effect.

@@CrawlerCanyon Man if you bring "in a vacuum" and "gravity like a fluid" to the same table as shock angle talk. I think your understanding of physics is messed up. Fluids is another can of worms like suspension geometry is already very complicated. Crawlers are genuinely slow enough to not worry about pushing molecules out the way in air. Things in space don't have to push many molecules out the way but gravity is always pulling you toward another body of mass. Maybe I should have said that is always straight from and to the center of mass of the different body's.

I don't mean "in an actual vacuum." I mean vacuum in the sense of cherrypicking one point to disagree with, ignoring everything else. I don't claim to be a physicist, and my math doesn't extend much past geometry-- but I am an empiricist, and I do take issue when someone argues a recorded result. Results for others may vary, as every rig is just a ball of variables, but a result is a result.

@@CrawlerCanyon Right reading text is mighty difficult because you miss a few cue's you can hear and see other wise. I'm not a physicist, I fall in the category of high functioning autism. My way of thinking is very literal. Jack of all trades, master of none. Meaning a at least have basic knowledge of many things. But I'm no expert in many things. The word of cars is my home. So I might know a thing or 2. You can call it a ball of variables but that makes it way more difficult to understand what is going on. So you take it 1 bite at a time ignore unimportant stuff so it's easy to understand. Let's go back to that cherry picking moment of holding a angle sensor against the (coil over) shock, moving the chassis so the shock is vertical you not only measured a shock angle but also chassis angle change. This is where you make it a difficult to understand a ball of variables. Sure a recorded result but here I am telling you keep the chassis angle constant and only move the axle up and down. Now you measure shock angle that is important and we ignore the arc it travels is for simplicity. And to be honest I don't want to be writing a wall of text to explain everything and people don't want to read a wall of text in comments. So I try to keep it short and simple, it's also fun to share a little knowledge.

I'm doing the same thing right now! 😄 that chassis makes me need to get smarter.

@@rybuds47 - right? I have a guy who knows a lot who is helping me out. I think it's going to be a lot of trial and error and incremental improvements

So long as tolerances are correct, the shock shouldn't care what orientation it's in.

There’s a difference between the rate of the spring and the effective rate when the spring is installed on the shock. There are charts to compute the effective spring rate depending on the angle of the damper. If the effective rate didn’t change, we would all run ours at a 90° angle, perfectly perpendicular to the ground.

@@CrawlerCanyon agreed. The video sounded like you were saying it differently either I missed it or you were keeping it simple for some. Always love your videos!

@@covecityboys oh, there’s every chance that the words that came out of my head aren’t the same words that were inside my head. My mouth outruns my brain every day, often to my own dismay.

@@CrawlerCanyon same here. ADHD, OCD and 136 IQ don’t seem to mix…..

@@CrawlerCanyon I have seen a ton of your videos. Haven’t seen this truck with this chassis run. Do you have any of those videos?

Possibly-- it depends on where the shock "bottoms out" on a given rig. Some builds will reach the physical limit of flex before the shock bottoms out, even with the shocks at 90º. A rig is going to have a maximum amount of flex determined by it's suspension geometry, whether that be 4-link or something else. There is such a thing as too much flex, so the shock can in some cases be serving a better purpose by limiting flex. I've never leaned a shock over purely for flex purposes myself. It's always been to soften the rate-- as many times, even a 2lb/in spring is too stiff.

Yes, you would get more travel vs being inline with the travel of the axle.

I call it suspension theory because... well, that's what I call it. Suspension design would perhaps be more pedantically accurate. Anti-dive and anti-squat are definitely things, and a working knowledge of them can absolutely help to get a rid to handle if not better, then at the very least more predictably. I stick to theory because there are a nearly infinite number of variables-- so knowing the potential outcome of changing a link length or mounting position is helpful, but won't necessarily point to an absolute outcome. We've all got different tires, different foams, different bodies, different everything. All that aside, the effects of +100%/-100% anti-dive all hold absolutely true. It's in the math.

@@CrawlerCanyon yes, exactly. There are a lot of variables in our business. and each variable affects the result

And I cannot isolate those variables. Any change made to one of my rigs is not guaranteed to have the same end result on someone else's-- but the fundamentals don't change, no matter what other variables are present. Raising the chassis mounting point for an upper link does the same thing to every vehicle with a multi-link suspension. Anything beyond that is determined by the choices of whoever engineered and/or built it. And let's be completely honest while we're at it: the lion's share of people have no idea what moving that link mount will do. They chose a mounting point to set the pinion angle (if they even look that far into it) and call it a day. I would reckon most people are still wheeling on however the RTR came from the factory.