Front Suspension RE-Install
Let me tell you, if they gave out trophies for being behind schedule, there would be no need for me to actually compete at autocross. The combination of an incredibly busy season at work and numerous setbacks with parts availability for the car has been frustrating to say the least, but the light at the end of the tunnel is getting a little closer.
As I had bought this suspension used, I was assured it was a complete 1 series setup - it appears the camber plates are a hodgepodge of E36 (!) and E8X/E9X parts and all very old in the scheme of Vorshlag's offerings. When we did the initial install, we ran into an issue where the stock strut tower braces interfered with the top of the shocks which made adjustment impossible and worse yet, physically made contact so it was extremely noisy and generally not satisfactory. With some help from our friends at Vorshlag, we were able to order some parts to retrofit this old style to the newer style bushing setup.
Unfortunately to fix this, of course that meant undoing all the work from last week... at least we had a hoist this week. Once we pulled them out, we retrofitted one strut and compared the two:
As you can see, you can now actually access the adjuster and it is a much lower profile overall solution. The assembly is slightly different in stack height but it's close enough to be virtually moot. At the same time, when we reinstalled them in the car, we added the 1M strut brace.
It is worth noting that this retrofit got us vertical clearance and is a much cleaner and superior solution but did not yield any extra camber as the diameter of that nut is basically the same as the overheight "before" top nut. You can also use the factory covers if you like for a clean looking "stealth" installation if you do not plan to regularly adjust your shocks:
Then we went to install the rears... and found that we did not have all the necessary bushings to install the rear shocks. ARRGH! It is just a never ending cycle of $50 in shipping to overnight $15 worth of hardware to Canada. So for now, I have a "hot rod" with some epic rake:
The goal is to run our first autocross on Sunday the 20th, but it will be a mad rush to get it ship shape before then. We need to figure out what hardware we are missing and receive it, install, align the car, and ideally flush diff fluid and brakes while we are at it. Oh well, without goals, where would we be... Until next time!
Mark