Camber Plates: Vorshlag vs GC

[teucci]

Hold on a second.....

Brian Mateucci, one of the owners of vorshlag (used to be motor-force)

Jay,

Brian Matteucci here. Not sure why you decided to drag my name into this after so long, but here I am.

1) For the record, I sold MotorForce and everything related to my business to the Vorshlag folks early in 2006. I have never had any ownership in Vorshlag. I am not involved in Vorshlag in any way. As a matter of fact, I haven't done anything even related to racing or performance cars for a few years now. This is actually the first time I've posted on a BMW board for a loooong time!. Priorities and interests change.

2) I have to comment on the video that you posted. It makes for a nice "sound bite" but the reality is downright dishonest. I'm going to pass over some of the valid points that others have already pointed out such as the questionable & "crooked" test rig, lack of load data and general lack of any scientific method.

The heart of the matter, Jay, is in how your camber plates work and how you are advertising them.

From your website:

http://www.ground-control-store.com/products/description.php/II=773/CA=182

"...the Ground Control design does NOT support the weight of the car on the spherical bearing. Instead, the weight of the car is supported by a completely separate articulating needle bearing...."

With the car at rest, or the suspension operating through it's normal range, this is true. The spring load IS supported through your "articulated needle bearing" and not the spherical bearing. Your "test video" isn't showing normal operation however. I assume you are trying to illustrate the effect of an impact load on the front suspension on the camber plates and strut towers. I also have to assume that since both simulated strut towers were distorted in your test and I haven’t seen any E30s in general use with that kind of strut tower damage (at least ones that haven’t been totaled in the process)… that the impact load that you are simulating is VERY large. Your hypothetical E30 suspension in the video would be hitting the bump stops H-A-R-D!

Now, on a standard twin tube strut, your simulated massive bump stop load would be transferred from the top of the strut housing through the compressed bump stop to the upper spring perch and into the Ground Control "articulated needle bearing". In the case of a standard, old style twin tube strut, the claim you make of “…the weight of the car is supported by a completely separate articulating needle bearing...." is actually true.

Unfortunately for Ground Control, good struts are usually inverted monotube units... AST, High End Koni, Moton, Bilstein and even a growing number of OEM such as EVOs and STIs. The bump stops on the inverted struts are on the bottom of the strut housing and the resulting loading is totally different. Jay, your catastrophic bump load in this case is through the strut shaft and straight into the spherical bearing, totally bypassing the upper spring mount and its "articulated spherical bearing". For these Ground Control customers, the spherical bearing DOES support the weight of the vehicle when the car is on the bump stop, and a massive bump stop load is the point that your video is attempting to illustrate.

GroundControl camber plates, depending on which struts are used, either pass the load from your video’s hypothetical bump stop impact either through the main spherical bearing in the case of inverted monotube struts or through the "articulated needle bearing" in the case of old, outdated twin tube shocks.

MotorForce camberplates, and by extension the later Vorshlag units, always pass the loading through the spherical bearing regardless of the struts used.

Now to the video. Jay has set up an Apples to Oranges test. He has the "Normal" case for the Vorshlag plate with the loading through the spherical bearing. For the Ground Control plate, he chose the "best case" scenario with the hydraulic press loading through the “separate articulating needle bearing“ on the camber plate and completely avoiding loading the spherical bearing. This "video" was rigged to insure the vorshalg plate would fail well before the Ground Control plate did.

I have no idea what kind of testing you do on your products Jay, but I assume that you do "worst case" testing on your products??? Or not?

Is the "test" portrayed in your video an example of deception or sheer ignorance of the engineering issues involved?

Is the statement on your website stating "...the Ground Control design does NOT support the weight of the car on the spherical bearing. Instead, the weight of the car is supported by a completely separate articulating needle bearing...." deceptive advertising or do you disclose this when people buy your products for use with inverted struts?

If it is SO bad to pass all of the suspension loads through the spherical bearing, why do Ground Control camber plates used with inverted monotube struts actually pass these loads mostly through the spherical bearing??

Finally, will you be willing to re-run the “video” with the worst case, equivalent case for both plates: Full load through the spherical bearing? This would be very easy to do.

Somehow, I doubt it.

3) Just because somebody makes a competitive product to yours doesn't mean they are copying. I thought that we cleared this up 6 years ago, as even a moron could clearly see that the original MotorForce E36 plate that I designed was not a "copy" of the Ground Control plate. About the only similarities are the mounting hole locations and the somewhat triangular shape of the main plate, both variables are dictated by the strut tower that they are designed to mount into.

It’s been awhile Jay. Haven’t gotten any hate mail from you lately :-P

-Brian “Freezingtexan” Matteucci

[Massive Lee]

Here's a technical question for Terry.

Most camber plates sold in "old Europe" will use only one spherival bearing (per plate), meaning that the same bearing takes the vertical load from the shock and spring, as well as rotational load.

GC's clever arrangement uses the spherical bearing to take the shock's load, while a second flat thrust bearing supports the spring's load and the rotational load (the weight of the car is on the flat needle bearing). Basically, two bearings to spread the work.

I can see that Vorschlag uses a big spherical bearing. Is there another one or does that big bearing takes care of shock, spring and rotation?

TIA

Lee

[Jean]

Terry - update your e30 thread! I am going to weight my car today after see the weight of yours!

[lifeiskaos]

7 years includes the old style...

edit: I see that you edited that post.

[Fair!]

I've been very happy with my vorshlag plates, but mine were badly bent after 2 years of normal street and track use. You guys quickly solved the problem by sending me new main plates, but I thought your statement was a bit inaccurate and needed to be cleared up.

OK, but let me clarify your situation, and I will indeed go back and restate my post above. Since you bought them at least 2 years ago, if not longer, the design I was referring to is different. I was referring to the current E30 Vorshlag plate design, which has a main plate that is thicker than the earlier versions that MotorForce made for the E30. We had some of that old inventory left over after we bought that company, but switched the material and thickness on our first production E30 main plate batches. We've only used this stronger main plate material on all Vorshlag production runs for this and other models we've built.

As for being pretty, form always follows function around here.

[scabzzzz]

The GC's sure are a lot prettier.
:)

[2002maniac]

We've also only seen 2-3 of our E30 camber plates "main plate" that have ever bent in the past 7 years, and those all happened after big crashes that heavily damaged the chassis. So we won't be changing anything in our bearing holder or main plate design - because they have proven themselves after many years of service on hundreds of cars.

I've been very happy with my vorshlag plates, but mine were badly bent after 2 years of normal street and track use. You guys quickly solved the problem by sending me new main plates, but I thought your statement was a bit inaccurate and needed to be cleared up.

[yberther]

^

I disagree. This wasn't a test per se. Otherwise would have conducted it like the test style that you are probably thinking of.

Again I disagree, we already did all of the testing and RD before we ever sold the first set many years ago. This is a demonstration

And thats the bottom line.

[Fair!]

The video that was shown clearly intends to destroy Vorschlag's reputation. But with very unconclusive/unscientific ways. This is not just comparative advertizing (aka Coke vs Pepsi).

Agreed. I won't engage in the type of "negative marketing" that others seem to relish, because it only makes the mud slinger himself look bad. I'd rather talk about the benefits and pluses of our products rather than linger on the well documented failures in someone else's products.



That video test is indeed very "unscientific", and utterly meaningless, as we have too much real world results to take much stock in it. We use that same model bearing holder on 12 different camber plate designs and have sold thousands of them since 2003, both under MotorForce and under Vorshlag afterward (Vorshlag bought the products, designs and inventory from Motorforce Engineering in January 2006. I am the sole owner at Vorshlag). We've never seen one MF or Vorshlag bearing holder break, ever. They've been used on countless street cars, track cars, auto-x cars, even rally cars. Zero breakage is fact - not some made-up, silly, teeter-totter demonstration. We don't have an axe to grind, just want to share the flawless, real world experience with this bearing holder.

We've also only seen 2-3 of our E30 camber plates "main plate" that have ever bent with our current E30 design (made for the past several years), and those all happened after big crashes that heavily damaged the chassis. So we won't be changing anything in our bearing holder or main plate design - because they have proven themselves after many years of service on hundreds of cars.



We also feel that our E30 design has ample negative camber travel (we've measured -4° on several E30s on multiple alignment racks), but I will concede that the newest GC design potentially has more inboard travel. Going with the counter sunk flush head bolts from the bearing holder to the main plate allows for top of the strut to slide inboard another 1/8" to 1/4", like our E36, E90, EVO X, and both of our E46 versions do. Kudos to GC for updating their design in that aspect. :)

There's some question about stack-up height on our plates. Here's a few tech articles we've had on our website (and on motorforce's before ours) to explain more about bump travel and stack-up height:

http://www.vorshlag.com/bumptravel.php

http://www.vorshlag.com/stackup.php

I'll post the pictures below to show two versions of our E30 camber plate. This isn't the textbook correct way to measure stack-up height of a camber plate, its just the way that someone else here measures it (proper stack-up height is measured from the top of the plate to the point on the bottom of the perch where the bump stop contacts).





On the second linked article above we show the stack-up height of some stock E36 strut top mounts, and the E30 is almost identical to the 95 M3 version shown, which are 53-55mm thick. As you can see the stack-up height of our E30 plates with coilover perches are shorter than stock, which is what is wanted to allow for more suspension travel.

Without getting into another competitor's dirty laundry, I will say this: we've sold thousands of camber plates but have only had to replace spherical bearings 3 or 4 times, ever. There was something strange about the use or situation in all of those cases, too. I don't think anyone else on the planet that makes camber plates can claim that low of a level of bearing replacement rate. This is due to two main factors: size of the spherical bearing and the unique upper spring perch/radial bearing design.

http://www.vorshlag.com/sphericalbearing.php

The spherical bearing we have always used in every camber plate design, since MotorForce days through today, are 3/4" (19mm) ID bearings from two name brand, US manufacturers. This is the bearing shown above, left. We now have them custom made to order in the USA, to our specs, and they are expensive. Most other camber plate designs built for BMWs on the market use a 5/8" ID (~16mm) ID spherical bearing, as typified by the picture above, right. The picture of a 3/4" and 5/8" spherical shown side by side is hardly a libelous action, by the way, just a plain old picture - that perhaps speaks volumes.

You can read the tech article linked above to see the impact loads that each size bearing can withstand before it fails, and impact load is what matters in a spherical bearing (cars never see thousands of pounds of static load). In this case - size really does matter.



Now having a bigger, stronger, more expensive spherical bearing is only part of why our camber plates are silent, trouble-free, and outlast the car. The other crucial aspect is the isolation of radial/turning loads on the spherical bearing, through a sealed radial bearing pressed into the unique upper spring perch, sold with all of our camber plates. This is a more complicated and expensive way to make a camber plate, but its the only maintenance-free method we have seen that works, for both race or street vehicles.



Our sealed radial bearings are rugged, reliable, and trouble-free. Unlike an unsealed flat radial bearing, these sealed units cannot have the grease washed out from the rollers in rain, cannot have road grime and dirt score the rollers and lock up the radial bearing, and they don't have to be removed and re-greased regularly. When a radial bearing locks up it causes popping and stiction in the steering wheel when the car is turned. Then the rotation of the strut shaft travels through the spherical bearing, which was never meant to handle turning loads. This causes a spherical bearing to fail quickly, no matter of strong it is. A spherical bearing is only made to handle axial pivoting, not turning.

Yes, our camber plates usually cost more than many others on the market. Hopefully my explanations above have shown why - sometimes a more expensive product has a cost that is justified. OK, that's most of what I posted before, and all I'm going to say until more real questions from other people pop up here. We've got real tech to back up every aspect of our products, and don't need to use cheap shots or parlor tricks to prove why our products are rugged and worth the cost. :D

Cheers,

[Massive Lee]

^dude, do you read?

he just stated that it was only for demonstration?

You don't think a company with either GC or Vorshlag's reputation wouldn't do real testing? And record data?
Clearly they do.

You're being ironic, right? The intention of the video was clearly not for "entertainment only". Especially when the poster asked how unscientific that was. I totally understand the will to push one's product over a competitor's. But there are some liabilities attached. The video that was shown clearly intends to destroy Vorschlag's reputation. But with very unconclusive/unscientific ways. This is not just comparative advertizing (aka Coke vs Pepsi).

Anyway, I still believe that both products are great. And both offer great solutions to steering/suspension problems.

[yberther]

^dude, do you read?

he just stated that it was only for demonstration?

You don't think a company with either GC or Vorshlag's reputation wouldn't do real testing? And record data?
Clearly they do.

[TwoJ's]

Wow. As was already stated, that video indeed is unscientific and meaningless. Why don't you use some proper machines and instrumentation to test them? How about a tensile/compressive tester? Load cells? Dial indicators to measure deflection? Maybe just ANY DATA at all?

[Hellabad]

Do the Vorshlag plates lower your car about a 1/2 inch like the ground controls?

I'm sure both of them are more than half inch.

I know exact numbers, but I don't have them right now.


Jay

[Hellabad]

It would be cool if there was a third party review of these products so we don't have to sift through the possible bias coming from each side of this conversation.

As is this is a pretty stupid way to get information.

I agree about the bias part. But GC went to extreme measures to ensure a fair comparison.

Both sides of the jig are identical. The bolts and washers on each side of the jig are the ones included with their respective camber plate.

After assembling with identical BMW strut towers on each side, we found the exact center of each camber plate.

Then the upper bar was marked for the exact midpoint between the centers, and then the press was carefully lined up to press exactly on the midpoint.

If you look at the start of the video you can even see that were careful to adjust each plate to the same camber so there was no ambiguity or dispute.

Then we just started pressing. All of the parts are here, from several comparisons, and if you ever want to see them just make an appointment and stop by.

Jay from GC

[Hellabad]

If you're willing to put that video of the Vorshlag plates breaking in your test session, why not record the force applied in the actual video or at least be willing to state it publicly instead of asking people to PM you for details?

I have been threatened to not post that info, or presumably any info.

And personally, what difference does *a* number really mean? If there is this much debate with no quantity, then what would happen if I said "8"? If I said "8" than somebody would say I was wrong and it should be "9" or "7.2566447"

I have a lot of people emailing me for a number, and its not a big deal.

This is how I think of it. Somebody says they have the best tug of war team in the world. Then there was a tug of war. One team pulled the other team into the sandpit. Nobody asks how much force it took. One team was clearly stronger than the other.