It’s allways fun to get involved is different and engaging projects. Here I am at Steinar’s garage to help him plan, specify and order shockabsorbers and swaybars.

 

Its fantastic to see the work Steinar has done here. The frame he built has just recently been at the local traffic station for control and scrutenizeing and it was approved without problems. The car has now got it’s Chassisnumber (VIN), hurray and congratulations! Until now Steinar has just borrowed shockabsorbers from me to be able to plan and build. But now its about time to do it right and measure dimentions accurate and decide spesifications of both the Bilstein Shocks and springs. We also deside where to mount the swaybars and how stiff they should be. It will be adjustable knife type swaybars both front and rear.

I measure the travel ratio between the wheel and shockabsorber. In front the damper movement is 75% of the wheel but at the rear I see that the damper moves 25% more than the wheel. This has to be taken into account when calculateing damper settings and spring ratios.

We also found a good place to mount the swaybars but also here there will be different ratio front and rear. Since this is a car with center mounted engine there will be wery different damper and swaybar settings compared to a normal front engine rwd car. The uprights, suspension arms and geometry is taken from a 1998 BMW 750i V12, and the engine comes from the same car.

The shockabsorbers I make for this car will be the same type Bilstein’s as you see in these pictures, just a bit longer. 25mm longer at the front and 50mm longer at the rear. They are made is aluminium and will have fixed setting, I am quite confident what setting Steinar needs on this car to be happy. First of all this is a car for driveing around in Trondheim and a few times on trackdrays for fun. It is really important the car is driveable on Norwegian road standards and we need some suspension travel to make this a good usable car.