Need some suggestions for reading material

[CAptynCrunch]

Ok, My girlfriend just left for university and I've got a lot more free time on my hands and due to my schedule I'm going to have hours of free time to kill everyday while I'm stuck at university due to BIG holes in my schedule

So I've decided that this term I'm gonna focus on suspension technology. I'm looking for the most complete and technical books i can Find. No dumbing down, no laymans terms.

I was reading up a bit on the web and saw some suggested reading for beginning to understand suspension tuning and geometry among other things. The two books I'm looking at are "inside racing technology" and carrol smith's "Tune to Win".

Before i order them i was wondering if anyone could suggest better books. From what I've seen of the reviews on Amazon.com both, while being well writen aren't the most in-depth and technical and tend to explain certain things in laymans terms. While this is nice it's not what I'm looking for. However these are online reviews so they aren't the most reliable

I'm looking for a COMPLETE explanation of suspensions and tuning them from a purely technical and engineering point of view. I'm an engineering student and am quite comfortable with all physics areas and would prefer a book that explains every detail in pure technical terms. No dumbing down, nothing. I just want the pure scientifical reasonings and explanations.

Any help would be greatly apreciated, I know it might sound cocky or like a bad idea, but I want to learn this stuff once and only once so i want to learn it right

[higgimonster]

the first place to look is in your school's library. I found amazing literature there about suspension technology. here are some of the books that i could recomend looking at for a more encylopedic reference:

SAE Automotive Manual (actually a set of 4 huge books)
Bosch Automotive Handbook

good luck. and be sure to go to the library (and ask them to order books you want, most school libraries will order books for you at no cost.)

[Filip]

I hope this isn't too late.

I can't comment about higgimonster's books but he's right; use the library as much as you can.

I'm building a car from scratch so I have looked through a few books. You can see some of them on my page, under the "books & plans" section. But to answer your question:

Carrol Smith is godlike. "Tune to Win" was excellent. Also if you become a member of SAE (SAE.org) you get 20% off of their books. It pays for itself after the first time. They have Smith's whole set.

As for a good suspension book, I really like Chassis Engineering, by Herb Adams. I can tell you it's not dumbed down at all. There are no big formulas but you'll learn a lot. At the end he has a series of chassis build with wooden sticks, and shows the effect of different mods.