A while back I posted that new suspension was mostly in house for Red. I’ve been holding off to let a potential buyer choose their own suspension until now, but I can’t take it any more.
This is lacking in pictures, because well there was a lot of work to do in one day, and cleaning my hands for camera duty slows things down. Anyway this is what happened:
Red’s entire strut assemblies were swapped into Whitey. Whitey’s strut assemblies (originally from my Red Supercharged Car) were disassembled and replaced the old KYB GR2s with the new ones. The TRD Springs stayed. These were then put into Red along with the complete set of Prothane bushings. Whew!
The result is a “Red” with a much more aggressive stance and much improved handling.
The problem I ran into came after it went in for the alignment. It drove worse leaving the shop than going in. There is quite a bit of increased play in the steering system. Don’t get me wrong, there was some there when it went in, but its way worse now. When took a look at the work that was performed to see what happened, I found some hardware store bolts holding the knuckle on. Obviously I wasn’t leaving this in place.
Since the alignment was void anyway, I yanked the rack and ordered up some internal guide bushings that are known to cause problems. While I was in there the inner and outer tie rods were replaced at the same time.
After putting it back together it was dropped of at Rennwerks for a proper alignment. It came back much better but the steering still had a smidge of play. The final issue ended up being the rubber isolator in the column itself. I removed the steering column and put a small weld on this area to basically eliminate this bushing all together.
Now everything is tight and handles like the go cart I remember from the last time Whitey was on the street!
