SRI Performance

Welcome everybody here to the SRI Performance Facebook page. I'm Blake Harris joined by Zeta Performance And today we're going to learn about our great Draco Racing Springs, our preloaders, and how you can use it for your specific application to get around the racetrack. So Andy, we got ourselves a nice spring smasher here, our great Draco Springs as a preloader. How about you tell us a little bit about them and how they can use it back home or at the racetrack for their race car. Well, let'start fundamentally and talk about what a preloader is. So we've got one of our preloaders installed here on a left rear shock. So what the preloader lets us do fundamentally is it allows us to, as we travel into the preloader, we can use a spring and it will behave It will apply load on the shock. But what makes a preloader special is we can control what happens in compression, independent of what happens in extension. So when we're in the preloader, it acts almost seamlessly and allows the spring to work as normal. But you can see as we extend it, t So what that allows us to do on a left rear, for example, is we can have effectively a large extended n So when we come back and we can press our shock a little bit, we sit on our big soft spring. But when we go back to the throttle in a left rear application, we can generate t So t But when we pick the throttle back up, we don't have all t So it makes it where the system's a whole lot more compliant and we can get more traction. So paired up with the right set up and shocks, we can run a preloader to get more road rotation on entry and more forward drive coming off the corner. And that's especially everyt But it also helps you back it down, maybe crack the throttle and it'll actually help you rotate to get in the corner. So it's the best of both worlds going in and coming off. Absolutely. And it's not relegated to only left rears. We've also got these in all sorts of different lengths. So t We also offer these in a 10 inch by 3 inch, 12 inch. We've got a 14, a 16. T And then t So t And so t So it's another way to be a little more flexible and have a few more options in your trailer all the time. You may say whether you're going to a quarter mile, Along with that, we sell all the necessary accessories to go with preloaders. You always want to have a pair of these 3 inch coil over bearings on here. And you always want to make sure to get your preloader wrenches. These also double really good for some shock wrenches. But you want to be sure to use these guys so you don't damage these bodies because these bodies are pretty sensitive. So you got it here. So what we've got our nice spring spacer as well. What are you exactly looking for on t So we're going to look at a couple of different t One of the most critical parts of the preloader is the timing. So it's really, really crucial that we're typically in most applications on a left rear looking for somewhere around an eighth to a quarter inch of gap at what we'd call our extended n And then we're going to look at our load. We're going to run back up into here and we're going to go about a quarter inch into it. And we're going to figure out what we want our extended load to be. So we'll be able to set our extended load and our extended load we're going to set using our wrenches. And we've got our wrench, got one that'll go on the body, one that'll go right here on the preloader. And that'll let us put load in the preloader. But we want to also do that independent of our timing. So that's going to set our load in the preloader. Then we're going to go all the way back up to our fully extended length. And when we get to our extended length, so we got it set right here at 23 and a half of this car, we're going to set this guy, And that's going to determine our timing. So that'll determine when we come in and out of the spring and also our load. And we just want to make sure, Because if you top that shock out, you're going to have no traction at all. The exact one comes in. Timing is everyt How it goes through the center of the corners, basically how quick t Yep, absolutely. And then, We don't look at our bottom n So you may wind up sometime putting down a softer spring, And then somewhere where you got to stay out of the throttle for a little bit longer, we'll put a little bit more spring rate in there so that we can actually travel down into that spring, but the spring will hold the car up rather than just load. So we may run a 50 at a really, really fast, quick burp the throttle type track and somewhere we're out of the throttle a little bit more, maybe we'll go up to a 75 or an 80. So for all the different super late model drivers, they have their own brand of stuff that they For someone who's been in the industry for so long, what could be the deciding factor to say, hey, let's change it up, let'start using these preloaders in the Draco's? Well one of the big t So we hold all of our spring rates tighter than anybody else does. We take a little different approach on how we do some of our design, but you can see that when you see these big coil gaps and how much travel we can get out of our spring. We do that through using an ultra We also manufacture our springs using a little different method. So all of our springs are manufactured in process called lathe winding. So each one of these springs is going to have a super, super consistent, extremely repeatable ID because t So we're able to be even more aggressive in our engineering because we can hold a tighter tolerance to the manufacturing process. And that lets us make super light, super accurate, And also with that, of course some springs out there, the rate might change to more where the spring gets. Us doing it t Absolutely, throughout the spring's life and also throughout the spring's travel. One of the common downfalls when you get into barrel style designs is as you vary that pitch and you vary that diameter, it means as those coils start closing up, you'll actually see a non-linearity in the rate. And you may see the rate increase as it travels or you may possibly even see it decrease a little bit where we're going to have extraordinarily good linearity through the entire travel of the spring. So there you have it folks, that meant the preloader, preloaders and the springs only available here at SRI Performance. Of course t com or 704662, 6982 and for more information, of course you can get in touch with myself andy for any more questions. Absolutely thank you Blake. Thank you Andy.