Quote:
Originally Posted by Bullitt
Good to know. You've just persuaded me to stick with the current spring rate. I can live with the dampers set at a stiffer setting to help reduce the incidence of coil bind which appears to be only occurring in corners that have sudden dips and undulations (present in mountain and canyon roads). Fortunately, these Ohlins remain fairly compliant approaching near full hard. Did coil bind disappear for you at a certain setting/number of clicks?
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This seems to me to be the wrong approach. If you are ever getting coil bind, you are over working your springs. Also, overdamping to reduce travel kind of defeats the purpose of having a fairly refined coil-over setup.
My approach to reducing preload while maintaining ride height takes two paths. Reducing preload requires lowering the lower spring perch, which brings it closer to the tire. In order to allow the perch to be lowered without bringing it any closer to the tire, I have made a 10 mm high spacer to go between the strut and the knuckle, which raises the lower spring perch the same amount relative to the tire. This allows me to lower the spring perch by 10 mm while making no difference in tire clearance. The spacer is keyed to maintain the indexing of the strut and knuckle.
With a 10 mm spacer, the strut is still fully secured by the knuckle. Taller than this would begin to reduce the support, and it would require re-routing the ABS cable. At 10 mm I believe the effect on brake hose routing and anti-roll bar end link geometry is small enough to be negligible.
The other part of my solution is my custom camber plates, which are 5 mm taller than the GC plates they replace. You could achieve the same thing by putting a spacer on top of your camber plates.
Therefore I can reduce my preload a total of 15 mm without any change in ride height from previously. At my selected preload of 3 mm, the lower spring perch is well clear of the tire (Nitto NT01 235/40ZR18 on Apex Arc 8 8.5 x 18 ET 45), so wider tires are also a possibility.
