camber adjustment

Tommy,

No one made this comment on your original post, but it should be noted that by drilling out the upper spring perch bump stop retainer to fit inside your springs, you have left your strut assemblies without any sort of bump snubber... not very good practice IMO... a heavy bump could bottom the strut tube in the housing and transfer all that load straight up to the top of the strut towers, bending / bowing them... there should always be some sort of bump stop.

SteveC
 
While I agree in principal...

fiatfactory said:
Tommy,

No one made this comment on your original post, but it should be noted that by drilling out the upper spring perch bump stop retainer to fit inside your springs, you have left your strut assemblies without any sort of bump snubber... not very good practice IMO... a heavy bump could bottom the strut tube in the housing and transfer all that load straight up to the top of the strut towers, bending / bowing them... there should always be some sort of bump stop.

SteveC
Click to expand...

And greatly respect your opinion Steve, I would argue that anyone running coilovers is most likely running springs that are far stiffer than stock, which has some amount of "built-in" protection from bottoming out. Not that it's not possible, I'm just saying that it's less likely if you are running stiffer springs. I don't run any bumpstops on my coilover setup either, so I'd be interested in further discussion from you on this.

Pete
 
Well in Tommys case he's already 2.5inches shorter in strut shaft travel... that's how he has set them up out of the car and allowed the cars weight to compress the strut down onto the spring... then the cars weight will compress the spring a little more...a good bump into a pothole could well bottom the strut shaft in it's housing.... I'm not sure what the total travel is on the KYB's...

Koni's have a strut shaft travel from fully topped to fully bottomed of 135mm (obviously you don't want to use every last mm) assuming Tommy's KYB's are similar spec, he's lost 63.5mm of travel straight away by his static setting out of the car... assuming 300lb/inch springs ... then there goes another 1.25 inches (31.75mm) with the spring compression from the cars weight (assuming 375lb/170kg front corner weight which is conservative)... be hard under brakes and tranferring a heap of weight forward and turn on road into off road at the racetrack... and you've only got 40mm of travel left to soak up any (over) loading...thats less than the bottom third of strut shaft travel...

If anyone has a set of KYB's in the box, maybe they could measure the shaft length fully extended and fully compressed so we can work out the shaft travel? It could be more but it also could be less...

Strut bump rubbers are available from Koni and the like... simply a tubular bit of rubber that slides over the strut shaft before assembly, and bottoms onto the gland nut area when the strut shaft is compressed to stop the shaft bottoming in the housing... some sort of snubber is definitely better than none.

SteveC
 
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Steve, good information...

I don't think I've ever seen after market snubbers, I'll take a look for them. Sounds like cheap protection.

Thanks,
Pete
 
Get yourself a set of poly bumpstops for a 280Z. They're hard to see in the photo below, but they're just below the upper strut mount:

X19RearCoilover.jpg
 
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