It's a really, really bad idea, but I might as well cover it.

Jelly, Baby

  As we have said before, a spring stores energy as a vehicle's suspension is compressed, and then releases it to return the height of the vehicle back to its original level. The trouble is, you have little control over how the energy is released. Springs are lazy buggers, and they want to make the energy someone else's problem ASAP. This is not such a big problem except for the fact that the settled, neutral position for the suspension is not at the limit of its travel.

  Imagine a weight hung from a spring, so that the spring is about halfway extended. Now, if you moved the weight up or down and let it go, what would happen? It would bob about on the spring, passing above and below its start position repeatedly (but less on each pass) until it eventually returned to the original state. This is exactly how the weight of a vehicle would act on its suspension, only with a compressive rather than tensile spring. As you can imagine, having the vehicle moving around like this would do nothing to improve comfort or control for the driver, so we want to get rid of it.

Suspension Without Damping - Sort Of.

  You may occasionally see, especially on trailers, suspension that does not appear to have any damping system at all. However, there is a crude damping effect present - built into the springs themselves. In most of these cases, a leaf spring is used. As the spring compresses or extends, the leaves rub against each other, and it is this resistance that provides a damping effect. Like I said, crude. It is highly unlikely that you will ever see this arrangement on a vehicle - though a well-designed leaf-sprung system will take into account this damping effect when augmenting it with seperate dampers.

  Although you can thus get away (kind of) without damping when using leaf springs, it's by no means a bright idea - and trying it with coil or torsion bar designs is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Remember, though, that Hydrolastic, Hydragas and Hyrdopneumatic suspension systems are not undamped - they do not require seperate dampers, as they have a proper damping system built in.

Back to Suspension Basics 9 - Hydropneumatic Springs

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