who has got rose joints on their caster bars?
was there a significant change in handling

I broke one on the way home from work last night had to put some standard ones back in.

was just wondering if they were worth the effort.
what size were used?

thanks

I've personally only ever seen them on japanese/import drift cars... It will have an effect on toe changes under hard braking more than anything else, I'd imagine. You'll get more handling improvement out of rose jointed control arms, and getting rid of the rubber strut tops. But if its a road car, just use urethane bushes in the castor rod and control arm.

it is a road car with some changes
got urethane bushes the caster bars were adjustable . yes i would like to change my strut tops.

hmmmmmm, question is did you ever adjust the ones you had, or can you just get say shorter than standard ones (non-adjustable) and leave em as that

When adding rose joints it is important to retain the original pivot point of the mount you are replacing. If you use a rose joint on the caster rod you really should remove the original front mount and fabricate a new mount further forward. To keep things a little more simple I use spherical bearings to enable the use of the factory front mount. By using the rose joints and normally pulling the strut forward for more caster leaves you with a short caster rod swinging in altered geometry which can bind and snap.........

I'm all for anything that improves a cars handling but rose joints on road cars make me nervous... they just get too much of a pounding on normal everyday roads.

I'd just stick with urethane bushes, they are easy to replace and importantly you can feel/see them wearing out. With rose joints the first you know something is wrong is when they snap - and naturally that usually happens at a point when you really have them loaded up. That's not the best thing to have happen when you are on a race track but at least that's a controlled area - on public roads roads it's something you just don't want to think about.

I have and the bottom line is that you will not notice the difference on the road.
What Stirling Mac is saying is absolutely correct and I have snapped 2 in years gone by. After the second one snapped the car got marched off to a very talented engineer friend of mine who took one look at what was going on and promptly fizzed off the old factory mounts and fabricated new mounts for the rod ends (on the ends of the radius rods) that are now in a position where they don't bind and everything moves freely.However I have'nt noticed any appreciable difference in the cars handling on the road. Hopefully I should have an answer re the racetrack improvments later this year.
Cheers
Dave

Not only is there a concern about breaking rose joints but it is not unusual for the rose joint to transfer vibration into the front mounts and have them crack. Remember if you make something stiffer it usually means you have to beaf up the mounting points because they were not designed to take hard mounts.
If you are concerned about breaking the standard castor rods then find some castor rods out of an early LJ Torana and mount those into polyurethane bushes. LJ rods are not only longer but are much thicker in their diameter and I've had them on my rally car for years and never broken one even under the most trying conditions. To fit them all you have to do is drill out the mounting holes to a bigger dia and bolt them on and set the castor to your requirements.

You won't break the standard 1200 castor bars on the road or track. But I can understand rally cars upgrading them.

I still use the standard bars and had them threaded for adjustment, and they've taken all my kerb hopping, wheel lifting, (and occassional bush bashing) antics on the track... I even ran up a bank a bit at a hillclimb once and tore the castor bar mount half off the body, but the castor bar was undamaged. Moral of the story - don't add weight where you don't have to

If you do go that route, definitely beef up the mounting points for the tension rods! The original welds are pretty weak. Here's a picture of the adjustable ones I just put on my car, haven't gotten a chance to test them out too much yet:

Pitroad Adjustable Tension Rods