- Joined
- Aug 18, 2008
- Messages
- 4,081
Kozy I have been reading your threads; doing some math and mostly beating my head against the wall trying to get my car to ride better. I feel the same way about the ride on my hatch. It doesn't ride like **** but I believe it should be able to ride better as it did before.
Good stuff, it's good to see someone have a proper think about what is going on underneath their car instead of just asking what the best coilover is!
Current set up is Neuspeed Sport springs on a set of brand new KYB AGX. Previous shocks were some worn out Tokico Illuminas. Car handles much better now but I seem to notice every imperfection in the road.
I spoke to some one at Ground Control and he told me the AGX have a lot of compression damping. I have been thinking that increasing the spring rate will help as it appears the AGX are overdamped for the spring rates I am using.
Can you tell me if simply increasing the spring rate with the current shocks seems to be going in the correction direction?
I am going to pull the trigger in the next 24 hours as I am getting tired to going back and forth. I am hoping I am going in the correct direction.
It may do, it may not. Ride quality is a tricky thing, a stiffer spring will make the car harder no doubt, but if you are currently overdamped then while it might get slightly stiffer, it may react to bumps better. Thats how it felt when I ditched the Koni/Tanabe setup for the Spoons. It didn't really get softer, but having the damping properly matched made a huge difference to the road holding at speed on bumpy roads.
It's hard to say whether stiffer springs is the answer without seeing a typical FV shock dyno plot for the KYBs and knowing the spring rate. If you can get those I could figure it out for you. What's probably happened is the high speed damping is very high (probably a linear FV curve) and that is what you are feeling through the road imperfections. A stiffer spring won't help that necessarily, it's more a shortcoming of the damper than the setup.
I could be wrong, but that's my gut feeling on this one. Can you find a dyno curve for those dampers?
Another thing I have been wondering about is how ride height has factored into the equation. I don't know anything about the Spoon springs but does your car ride higher know than with the GF210's?
Yes, about 20mm higher. Made everything better apart from it doesn't look quite as good!