You must be logged in to rate content!
3 minute(s) of a 612 minute read
5-4-2012
5-4-2012
Latest pic of my Turbo baby; this one on the switchback in the neighborhood around my house. Now you know why I am always searching for "stiffer and lower"; the curves are not kind to soft suspension and these roads are what I drive through daily.
5-10-2012
Chris, congratulations! Your dedication is impressive and the car is something else! I am jealous.
Timccloud, thanks. Another shot of my baby .
For photographers among us: shot in RAW, developed with Capture One, camera is Canon 1D, lens Canon 85mm f/1.2, location: winding roads of South Bay area of Los Angeles - this switchback is actually only 2 minutes from my house (yeah!). I normally tripod these shots but not here because I was afraid some crazy driver testing his car might run me over, standing in the middle of the road and all 
.
10-28-2012
DAMPENING (damping) FORCE ADJUSTMENT
This has nothing to do with the plug and play Bilstein Damptronic, but it's a good chart and good read so I'll repost it here. Sorry it's been a while so I don't have the link where I got this algorithm (for a coilover with independent bump/rebound adjustment), but it is from Bilstein and I will post it here as an example of how complicated suspension tuning is. It illustrates the points above, that bump and rebound (obviously) interact, and more importantly, front AND rear interact to influence understeer/oversteer behavior. Pro's will do this in their sleep, but for us amateurs, it could be a hopeless quagmire.
Take the rebound setting for example, say it has a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being softest. 1 will make the car soft and mushy, 10 will make the car lose traction over bumpy surfaces, somewhere in between there is a setting that will result in "best" traction, and it would be up to your setup person to find this sweet spot for you. Note that the point of max traction doesn't frequently coincide with the point of max comfort - another decision for you to make.
This is the reason that IMHO for the majority of amateur drivers, the plug and play Bilstein B16 Damptronic is a much better solution than manual-setting coilover such as Bilstein B16 PSS10. The pros have done the dirty work for you when you have the Damptronic. The best analogy is that when my wife needs to take a picture, I give her the small Point-and-Shoot Panasonic camera, and not my Canon 1D DSLR with the manual Contax-Zeiss lens. Complexity in the wrong hands tend to cause complex complications! :-)