Coilovers - spent all morning looking

[crak]

Thanks Mkid I am looking for experience with coilovers and autocross sacrificing comfort for performance.

[Exyia]

I want to comment but there just isn't much for RA's

all I can say is that
- corrossion will (eventually) happen with any coilover with really bad salts. all coilovers are made of metal
- the main component of a coilover is the shock. once the shock is made, lots of lower end companies adapt fitment/sizing to any car they can think of. this makes production especially cheap (BC's are the best example). whenever I see a cheap coilover, I assume all they did is take the same valving and just measure it to fit ___ car
- high quality valving is expensive. it costs a lot and there's no getting around it. you should see the dinky-looking valves I mess with at work, your jaw will drop at their prices. if I see a cheap coilover, I also assume the valving build quality/material is weak
- I highly prefer monotube over twintube, especially on heavy cars like ours

also, apparently BC no longer rebuilds/services their coils. They only sell you replacement parts. I find that somewhat surprising, as at least BC used to have decent service to match their budget price

[crak]

Originally Posted by Exyia

I want to comment but there just isn't much for RA's

all I can say is that
- corrossion will (eventually) happen with any coilover with really bad salts. all coilovers are made of metal
- the main component of a coilover is the shock. once the shock is made, lots of lower end companies adapt fitment/sizing to any car they can think of. this makes production especially cheap (BC's are the best example). whenever I see a cheap coilover, I assume all they did is take the same valving and just measure it to fit ___ car
- high quality valving is expensive. it costs a lot and there's no getting around it. you should see the dinky-looking valves I mess with at work, your jaw will drop at their prices. if I see a cheap coilover, I also assume the valving build quality/material is weak
- I highly prefer monotube over twintube, especially on heavy cars like ours

also, apparently BC no longer rebuilds/services their coils. They only sell you replacement parts. I find that somewhat surprising, as at least BC used to have decent service to match their budget price

I did read that BC was great on warranty work, its surplussing to hear that they are not putting in as much effort. Pretty much reading up on it, you get what you pay for seems to be the going trend. The FA 510's with swift springs look to be super promising. However, no one has used them yet from what I know, they only have tried the 500's and said they were grat. I couldn't imagine how good the 510's would be for autox using 9/9.

I did some reading and the twin tube design is a cheap system compared to the monotube. Apparently car manufacturers use the twin tube because its cheap, easy to create in bulk and gets the job done for normal street cars. Monotube is where its at if you want performance.

Thanks again to the link here: http://www.evoxforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=66230

oh, and Exyia, that was a very good read on how our suspensions should be set up for better handling. Thanks for that! EVO and ralliarts have the multi-link rear suspension. It would be safe to say that when updating suspension and say bars on an evo and ralliart it could done similarly. (minus housing differences, but the blaance and spring rates could be identical)

C

[Exyia]

Originally Posted by crak

oh, and Exyia, that was a very good read on how our suspensions should be set up for better handling. Thanks for that! EVO and ralliarts have the multi-link rear suspension. It would be safe to say that when updating suspension and say bars on an evo and ralliart it could done similarly. (minus housing differences, but the blaance and spring rates could be identical)

C

I thought the same

but when my buddy (Sean, not sure if he's on this forum) added a rear sway, I told him 27mm Whiteline is the proper size for our rear sway bar. Whiteline only offers a 24mm for the RA, which left me confused. I told him to run it full stiff to compensate for the smaller diameter

Then at the next event, it was FAR too stiff in the rear - almost tripoding in some areas.

Props to Whiteline not getting lazy with R&D. I would still agree that it's similar enough to use Evo X data/input for setups, because the RA crowd is still pretty small

KW is the only one I respect for twin tubes as their v3's work pretty damn well. I still prefer monotubes 100%, but what they accomplished with the v3 as a twin tube is pretty impressive. But our cars are so damn heavy that durability and heat should be a bigger factor than normal imo, so I would like to avoid heatsoak. But realistically in autox it's not likely to have a noticeable effect

[Markspd6]

just be glad its not the Independent rear suspension, like my mazda which has one less adjustable part, even on expensive KWs...

[crak]

RA is multilink just link the evo