Why coilovers?

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jayro

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So I know you can adjust ride height etc, but from a handling standpoint why are they so much better? Is it simply because you can have a better variety of spring rates? I have a fairly new koni/Intrax set up (among other things) and don't have much body roll. Wondering why coil overs would be so superior to my set up? Educate me on coil overs.
 

dohcsable

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Were the Shosource ones multi adjustable? I know the koni's are only rebound.....but the KW's on the ti are compression, rebound, and something else adjustable.

I'm just awaiting Sam to drop a fudgie of knowledge in here.
 

zach44102

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SHOsource coilovers have adjustable reboud, and compression. They also are a lot more favored because unlike ground control or most sleeve type coilover setups you dont lose strut travel by making your ride height lower.

On SS coilovers instead of adjusting the spring perch the body of the strut is adjustable.
 

SHOspazz92

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You just don't feel like your car has to much body roll because it's probably the stiffest suspension setup you have owned on a SHO. I assure you, it rolls, sways, dives and does all kind of other cool stuff.

Any Base Koni/Tokico - Intrax/Eibach setup is way to soft and I promise if you put your car on some corner weights the cross weight would be all sorts of jacked up. As stated, coilovers make it very easy to corner balance. A friend of mine did some calculations on my car (Based on my corner weights, track width, brake caliper/rotor weight, etc...) to see what kind of spring I would need to get the ride frequency up to 2.7 hz up front. The answer? 1400lb front springs. Obviously that's not happening, so I will be going to to a 700lb spring instead which would net me 2.25hz...not to bad.

At it's current weight the rear of the car is damn near perfect with 500lb springs, right at 2.7hz, so I won't be touching those springs. However the Koni's will still be revalved.

And why yes, the GC's do have issues (mainly in the front and it's more of a Koni issue) with running out of travel should you lower the front end to much (I just recently ran in to this issue lowering the front of my car a bit) this can be easily fixed by sending your front Konis off (Rears to, if desired) to be shortened and revalved to handle whatever spring you want. I will be doing this soon at the tune of about 200 dollars per strut.

The SHOsource Coilovers would alleviate many of these issues right out of the box as you can order different spring rates if you desire (They claim the coil-overs can handle a 600lb spring). I absolutely loved the ones on my blower car. However once my ground control setup is dialed in it will be perfect for what I want my car to do: Autocross. They honestly have held up and performed very well over the years with the 500/500 springs setup. So while the GC gets some bad rep , this is mainly due to people running to soft of springs, slamming their cars , not corner balancing them and then wondering why the car turns like shit and bounces all over the place.

Good luck.

-Sam
 
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jayro

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Thanks for the info guys. I was always kind of curious about what all the benefits are.
 

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