Quote:
Originally Posted by ignaro
I took at look on ebay and these aren't actually much cheaper than the vikings that came with my UMI kit. I drive really hard through the canyons in LA and commute over hard road conditions an hour each way. The whole kit has held up really well, including the viking shocks.
Ebay Aldan American front coilover kit $540
Summit has UMI Viking, same as I have $690
Neither is really cheap. Both are height-adjustable. Aldan looks pretty reputable to me but i see a few complaints online. This forum will always tell you to buy the older, "better-made" stuff and many are allergic to products that don't have a flag on them. Sometimes their advice is right, sometimes it's not.
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The problem here isn't american made or not. Just because something is made in the US doesn't automatically make it a quality item.
The issue I have with these is that they are expensive and are in general not a good design. You can see the design issues as soon as you put one directly next to a true coil-over. The biggest thing you'll see is that the spring is not encapsulated by the complete coil over. In the hybird setups that we're talking about here, you have a conical spring that seats in the upper spring pocket the same as a traditional coil spring would, then tappers down to sit on the threaded perch.
As the car moves through bump and droop the spring literally pushes on various sides of the shock body depending on how it's being loaded, not only vertically but also horizontally. This is why the cheaper units with welded on or press fit threads fail over time. They literally get pushed and pulled off the shock body.
The shock's pushrod is now also taking lateral loads. The cheaper units again utilize the same type of pushrod that is found in a traditional shock. That part isn't intended to see lateral loading.
Case in point, the only actual advantage of the hybrid coil-over setup is the fact that you can adjust ride height without having to crack the spindle away from the ball joints and lower the control arm. You don't gain nearly as much weight savings as you do with a true coil-over. You don't gain any of the net suspension travel that you get with a true coil-over and you don't really gain any performance advantage over a traditional coil spring setup.
So if that's the case and the original poster is just trying to correct a lean in the body, why on earth would he need to spend $500-$700 to do it? There are various methods of correcting that ride height issue that will cost about $50.00 and take an hour and a half of work. The only drawback being that he doesn't have easily adjustable ride height.
Now, if the original poster is just looking for an excuse to go coil-over because he wants to be able to say he has coil-overs, then that's a different story. In that case, I would recommend the QA1 double adjustable, which is the most robust system I've seen in the $750-$800 range. I would rate the Alden American pieces similarly.
The best non-surgical coil-over conversion I have researched is the Verishock coil-over conversion. It gets you closer to a true coil-over, and addresses some of the issues inherent with the hybrid coil-over design. You pay for it though.
http://www.cachassisworks.com/Attach...XXX_DS_WEB.pdf
At $1048 per set, they are expensive. What they do better however is provide a true linear spring and shock by hard mounting the entire shock and pushrod at the upper spring perch and using an integral top spring perch on the shock itself. The upper mount is a pivot ball which allows the shock to arc in any direction while keeping the pushrod and spring always functioning in a linear only state. Because you aren't gaining travel with this setup an integrated progressive jounce bumper is there to lesson the chance of shock damage by slamming the shock into the upper perch. It has oversized cross-bars a the base to help transfer load to the lower control arm (especially important when using the factory parts).
The biggest drawback is how the shock is being mounted in the upper spring perch. It uses the hole for the car's top shock mount, which again is not designed to hold the entire vehicle's weight. The Verishock system does include sandwiched plates that help to fortify this area, but again this is the nature of these hybrid style setups. You have to compromise somewhere when using factory parts and un-modified chassis.