Quote:
Originally Posted by ghoonk
My Zeal Function X coilovers come with independent spring pre-load and height adjustment collars. They have been corner-balanced but I have found that the coilovers have a tendency to bottom out on bad depressions in the road or over bumps.
To this end, I was thinking of getting adjusting the spring pre-load collars to get longer stroke, but before I do that, I wanted to check in with you guys on:
a. whether i would need to have the car corner balanced again. The spring pre-load adjustment collar has no visible effect on ride height as I can see
b. what effect on handling would there be to having a longer stroke?
|
Fact: Every time a person mentions pre-load in reference to cars, God kills a manatee.
a. The collar on which the spring sits is the spring perch. On these designs, the only reason there is an adjustable spring perch and spring perch lock (the collar below it) is so that you can turn the two against each other as hard as possible, locking the two together. When you turn one, the other turns, and the entire shock body turns inside the adjustable lower mount. That raises and lowers your car's height at that corner without reducing available stroke, which is you don't have a lot of with short-stroke high-displacement coilovers.
b. As much stroke as you can get is generally what you want. More stroke = more distance the piston can travel before bottoming or topping out inside the shock body, assuming your spring has enough available distance between its coils before binding.
Determine what it is that is bottoming out before you go undoing your expensive corner-balancing procedure. Is it the piston inside the damper? Is it the tire on the wheel well? Is it the spring binding? If you have an adjustable lower mount, you should only use that to adjust height. There is no reason to reduce available shock travel if you don't have to, and (IMO) pre-load should never be used as a tuning method on a car, and the only time it plays a role in corner-balancing is if you have a car without an adjustable lower mount, but that's not the case here.
