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Volkswagen Golf: Stance, Shifting and Sucking Sounds Sep 8, 2009

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This past week, we’ve completed a bunch of small projects on our Golf. Now that the car has a new suspension, the first thing we accomplished was getting an alignment. The combination of fat wheels, fat tires and coil-overs meant that we had to be careful about how much negative camber we were getting from the two-slotted bolt holes on the lower strut mount. If we dialed in too much here, the inside of the tire would hit the coil-over.

We used the Ground Control camber plate to get as much negative camber as we could at the top of the strut and from the slotted lower ball joint holes at the bottom. The result was 2 degrees of negative camber and no rubbing issues.

Next on our list was addressing the bushings in the shift linkage. Some were missing, and the ones that remained were aging. We replaced them with new pieces from Eurosport Accessories. We also added one of Eurosport’s short shift kits—it has a choice of 30- or 50-percent reduction in throw. The larger reduction was a little notchy for our tastes, so we chose the smaller amount.

While we were under the hood, we replaced the restrictive factory airbox and air filter with Eurosport’s Coolflo intake system. It has a built-in heatshield to keep warm engine compartment air from entering the intake stream.

We have a sneaking suspicion that our catalytic converter’s internal matrix is plugged and loose in its housing, as we have been getting weird surges in power levels that are accompanied by a rattling sound from the cat. After that’s fixed, we’ll strap the car to a dyno to see how we’re doing and how we can improve from here.

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Comments

95vwsport:

Car is looking sweet. Is 2 degrees for your camber going to eat tires? Trying to maximize my street car handling without killing my tires. Please tell me a megasquirt system is in the future. Would love to see the install and results.
Sep 20, 2009 10:19 a.m.

95vwsport:

I was looking back through the updates. How do you like the neo gen tires? I'm considering them in 205/50/15 and wanted an opinion.
Sep 20, 2009 10:24 a.m.

Per Schroeder:

With zero toe, 2 degrees of camber isn't that bad. It's the toe that eats tires, in our experience. I wound up not getting the Nitto Neo Gen tires. I'm still running around NT01s. That said, we like NeoGens, they're a good bang for the buck tire with some allseason capabilities. It'll get a standalone system at some point. Maybe not MS as we've done a few of these and want to try one of the cheaper built units.
Sep 20, 2009 11:04 a.m.

95vwsport:

“Cheaper built units” - now you're talking my language!! I'm so cheap I wired in some extra relays I had and a switch to kill the aggravating always on headlights. Plus now I can run my fogs with no headlights - for whatever that would be good for. By the way car looks sweet. Glad to see you are still building “real” cars.
Sep 21, 2009 9:42 p.m.

djmiles:

I assume if you're worried about the tire rubbing the coilover, then I have no chance of running the same size tire with the stock spring perches.
May 20, 2010 2:11 a.m.

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