supra update
 

We've been working hard on the car for the past couple weeks. She got some new coilovers. These coilovers consist of bilstein take apart dampers and hypercoils springs. I determined the damping and spring rates needed and valved these myself on a shock dyno. We haven't driven with them yet, but they should be pretty awesome. I might be putting together a kit in the near future if anyone is interested. They would be custom valved for your setup based on what type of setup your going for, the weights of your car, sway bars, tires, etc.

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One of the dampers on the dyno.

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Front setup on the car.

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The rears all ready to go on the car.

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The custom shock mounts.

Now for the exhaust, we decided that a regular exhaust is stupid. So we send our out the side of the car. And since the car is going to be low, we went with oval tubing to get the extra ground clearance we needed.

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Mocking up the exhaust before the final welding.

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Yeah, it's mean.

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Another side view.

Some of the other stuff we've been doing has been a little more weight reduction.

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We found some extra material on the hood, so we cut it off.

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We're going with the four hood pin setup with no hinges or latch in the front. It's just more badass that way.

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Got a new quick release and just waiting on the deep corn to show up next week. For now we'll use my personal wheel on the car.

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I also made a shift knob for the car a couple months ago. We cut the top of the stock shifter off and I didn't want to go with something stupid and cheap, so I made one out of some random 2024 I had lying around.

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I also made some new endlinks for the sway bars. Just simple stuff. I need to come up with a new design, single shear is stupid.

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One of them installed. They need to be adjusted once we get the ride height set with the new suspension on there.

I think that's about it for now, everything should be back together in the next couple days and I'll get some on the ground shots with the suspension. it still needs wheels, badly. But the money isn't there right now. Action shots will come next week.

For some of the original build info, go here
http://www.theoryinpracticeengineeri...topic.php?t=12

I also want to thank Greg (turbo 04 specv or something on here) for welding the exhaust, Jim at JM Fabrications for making the mounts, Josh at S&W for making the spacers, Mac at RT Tuning for the quick releases and steering wheel.

Hmmm do you want to sell a pair of those endlinks? I can measure my stock ones and give those to you.

--Adam

Totally awesome, that's going to be a very cool car. I'm a huge fan of the third gen supra.

Can you take apart and revalve any bilstein dampers?

Can't wait to see how this thing turns out.

Keep it up guys.

Wow, thats great that your doing that for your brother. Good to see such progress.

Damn you dont play around.

Adam, I will be selling endlinks sometime in the near future. Right now I don't have the facility to properly make them. I really like tapping on a lathe because it's much easier to make sure everything is perfectly straight and right now I don't have access to a lathe and it wouldn't be too cost effective to pay someone else to do it for me right now.

Raven, it depends on the damper. Some bilsteins are sealed. If it's not sealed and it's a monotube shock, I can do it. But I haven't gotten a dyno yet, so any adjustments I would make, I wouldn't be able to verify the work. If they're struts, I don't think there's much I can do. From what I've gathered bilstein struts are twintube, making them very had to bleed without expensive equipment and very hard to fill with gas unless you have more very expensive equipment. What type of suspension is on the Saab, if it has shocks all around then we might be able to put something together.

Thanks everyone for the comments. And I'm not just doing this for my brother, he's helping out a lot and this is a great learning experience for him. I mean I don't know many people who started buying they're own shell and donor chassis before they turned 16. Of course, i did kind of piush him into it but he's stuck here now.

JC, we do play around. This is it. I doni't have the money to really get serious just yet. But when I do, everyone will know.

I thought all bilstein dampers (shocks and struts) were monotube. I have struts at the front, and I'm pretty sure they're monotube and the rod is almost as big around as the strut body (I could be completely wrong), waaay beefier than what came off. The rears are shocks inside the spring. I know my dampers are rebuildable, not sure if that means they're not sealed though.

Honestly, I'm just curious what the suspension expert would make of my setup. :P

Hahah sounds good to me. OEM ones on the Saturns are so week, and of course there is no aftermarket. I thought you just threw them together didn't know they were machined. Let me know when you decide to make some up.

--Adam

How did you determine the spring rates??? Is it gonna be a street driven vehicle???

I considered these for my car but since I drive it on the street and on the track I am thinking about going with the new Tein monotube Flex coilovers. It's just real convenient to be able to change your damping with the push of a button.

oh yeah? what track do you go to

Raven, I was suprised at first to find out about twintube bilsteins as well considering how they talk about their twin tubes. I know all of the motorsports shocks are monotube. I'm not sure about the motorsports struts. Are your fronts inverted struts? If they are, they may be monotubes. If not, they're probably twintube.
http://www.bilstein.com/tech.php?PHP...9b7b60afae3387
In the middle of that page, they talk about their struts a little.

Adam, I started to make these without using a lathe and it was a pain in the ass to cut and sand/grind down the end until it was smooth and then line up the tap. So since I had access to a lathe at the time, it was just a whole lot easier to do it there. I didn't have to worry about cutting it, then grinding, then tapping and then doing the other side. It just ended up coming out a lot cleaner and a lot nicer this way.

TurboTagTeam, I determined spring rates by getting the car on the scales and measuring the sprung and unsprung weights. Then I measured the installation ratios and decided what natural frequencies I was going to shoot for. Based on this I had an idea of what spring rates I wanted to run. I also measured the sway bars and their installation ratios and using this and some other suspension variables I was able to come up with the total lateral load transfer distribution. Using this and the natural frequencies I found a balance that I liked and that gave me the spring rates I was going to start with.

It would be a street driven vehicle but I don't know if it's going to pass inspection. And insurance gets expensive for two cars. I would definitely drive it on the street, the shocks are valved pretty stiff in low speed, but in the high speed region they really fall of so it should be comfortable, or at least comfortable for what it is.

changing damping with the push of a button would be nice if the damping where anything you would actually want. I've seen some dyno data on the standard JDM damper and some specifically on the tein's and it has never looked like it should. there's something about it that doesn't seem right, too much rebound or not enough compression. That's why we went this route. Adjusting the dampers takes a little longer because I have to revalve them, but I'm down to like 6 minutes to revalve one of them so it's not too bad. And I know what the curves look like and I designed them the way I wanted them to perform, so I know what I'm getting.

One thing to consider is how those tein's change damping. Do they just change rebound or rebound and compression at the same time? If they just change rebound, the ride quality won't change too much in terms of absorbing bumps. But then again, most aftermarket coilover are a lot stiffer and have a harsher ride. But since it's just a street car you'll be fine with whatever.

The Mono flex's are only adjustable with compression and rebound at the same time. Tein just came out with a super racing coilover system with independent adjustability. The system uses an external reseviour and two EDFC systems to control both settings while in the car.

When you say inverted do you mean strut on top of the spring, or the shock absorber where the rod usually goes. Mine is the normal spring on top of strut setup, but it looks like it's the shock is at the top in the place of the rod. Don't know if you can take it apart, but I'm about 90% sure it's a monotube.

TurboTagTeam, how much is the double adjustable tein setup with two edfcs? It just seems stupid to me, I mean sure the edfc can nice, but whatever. It's probably as expensive as a real damper setup. So probably not worth it unless your that lazy that you can't get out of the car to adjust the dampers.

Raven, I would have to look at them to see if I could do it? Do you have a part number, I might be able to look it up.

Back to the car, today we got the rear dampers on and we're bleeding the brakes just to find out that the master cylinder is either cracked or the reservoir is leaking, but it's just sucking air in rather than leaking all over the engine bay. We replaced it, but I had the fun experience of finding out that there is no place around here that has decent brake fluid after 7 on a Sunday. And we had gone through a liter and a half before we realized that the MC was sucking in all that air.

define stupid :)

which stupid are you talking about? I said that a bunch of times. If your talking about when I called the double edfc's stupid then that's just my opinion. Adjusting shocks can get confusing especially when they're more than single adjustable. And that's when you're going around to each corner to adjust. Adjusting from one place inside the car could make things even more of a mess without writing down every adjustment you make. And there's the possibiltiy of making the wrong adjustment and not realizing what you did. By going around the car each time you need to change something you have the time to think about it a lot more.

The prices for the mono-tube flexes were not released yet. However the SuperRacing Coilovers (dual EDFC) are 2500 without the EDFC. I don't see how it could get confusing. Everything is on the EDFC screen for you.

Yeah, but I've tuned 4-way adjustable dampers on a race car. It gets confusing, trust me. Even though I had everything written down, it would still get confusing when you're trying to tune a suspension.

2500 with out edfc, you could buy real coilovers for that price.

The car is now all ready for it's first event tomorrow. I'll have some time to shake down the car in the morning then mess around and do a little drifting tomorrow night. There's not really a point to try and do any suspension tuning tomorrow, e-town isn't the best place and we have no good tires for the car. So at least we get to take her out and see what breaks and then hopefully we'll be able to get to a real track in the next month to do some real suspension tuning.

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