El Rabbit suspension upgrade

84FSP wrote: Fronts are ready to go in after some install and bump stop modification...

Just a quick note. Bilstien sports and HDs have internal bump stops so your external ones are not needed. That is unless they removed yours in the revalve process or you are using them for tuning in some way.

Plans for a big rear bar mimicking the shine style are in the works!

Good to hear I can get rid of those bump stops! I was on the fence as to keep or get rid of them before knowing they were superfluous.

Hit a few snags today but I'm still keeping things moving. As I assembled the front struts it became apparent that the assembly was approx 3/8" too tall. After some quick attention from the bench sander things were back in line.

Everything was looking good till I started final assembly... So there was one minor measurement I hadn't verified in my quest to sway in the mkii strut housings. By minor i mean major as the upright for the mki is 1/4" skinnier with a different relation on the bolt holes.... Doh...

So now i'm taking a strategy break while I decide if i want to find the scirocco 16v uprights and brake or to swap back to the mki setup. Not to worried about going backward to the mki setup but really wanted to be able to upgrade to different struts later. The mkii wheel bearing and hub setup is a bit beefier from memory as well.

Input appreciated....

The internal ones are pretty significant

doubling up seems excessive

Holy crap - those are huge!!!!

Ok, if you use MkII knuckles, will the axles (outer CV joint spline dia.) and the ball joints work?

After looking at the pictures of the A1 control arms it looks like ball joints would just bolt in place...

Sitting here looking at the same thing. Apparent the ball joints are different but can be swapped. For some reason i thought the calipers were different as the mki setup has a seperate hub and daliper carrier where the mkii setup is all in one. Off to the garage to test fit...

I have done the MK2 knuckle on MK1 struts and vice versa before.

Another thing you will notice is that both mount holes do not line up. You will need to plug the existing lower hole in knuckle and drill a new one. Then you can use some shims to make it fit.

Conversely I have machined down the A2/3 knuckle to fit the A1 strut, filled and redrilled the lower hole. I ran 10.1" A3 brakes on my 81 rabbit pickup this way. Two of the lower ball joint holes in the rabbit control arm match up so you can redrill the third further in and hammer the later, larger ball joint in deep enough.

Not all A2 knuckles have the built in caliper carriers. Early 9.4" were the only ones IIRC.

One thing to keep in mind. Swapping to the A2/A3 knuckles will relocate the steering arm lower. This was just fine for me. My car aligned perfectly and drove better than ever. I had to extend my tie rods both on the inside and outside threads to get them long enough.

Great input Ditchdigger! Trying to decide which path I prefer more of the current options. Seems like three options momentarily. Need to noodle on this a minute...

-Chop down the mki strut housings and roll on -Run the mkii hub and balljoint and adjust the ball joint mounts as you described -Run the mki hub and drill the upright to fit the mkii housing

So had rabbit time in the garage the last two weekends and have her out on the road.

Went with the MKI housings after some thought about having just refreshed all the components over the last months. Will keep a lookout for the right setup to do the swap to MKII at a later date.

Trimmed up the MKI housings

Gotta love low tech hacksaw action...

Painted up the goodies

Did some measuring tape adjustments to the collars and let her down. Not happy with how much travel I apparently lost to running the camber plates underneath the towers.

Basically out of adjustment before even corner weighting on the front currently. A arms are still a fair bit above parallel. I'm here for handling not "stance" but think they may have to come off and move the front collar stops lower than the factory perches. The other option would be to pickup 6" springs instead of the 7" setup on it currently... 2.75" tire gap front 1.5" tire gap rear

The race setup is is 1 inch smaller in diameter than the street setup so it exacerbates the issue.

Momentarily taking a second to drive her to work and get a few things sorted out while I work out the best fix.

First issue is alignment settings. I've been doing some homework on how much the huge static caster increase will effect my static and dynamic camber.

Current thoughts are that I should have 5 degrees caster and increase from I believe zero in the stock setup. Was kicking around starting with 2 degrees negative camber and zero toe to see how that feels.

The increased steering wheel resistance - feel with the caster is interesting. I'm curious what it feels like at speed on the course...

Tons of other little crap to work out that I've been neglecting from intermittent speedo to a intake improvement...

Signed up for the upcoming autox event Oct 5th. Should be a good shake down day as I haven't run the course at the Wilmington airport before. Planning to load up the car for the event before I leave this Friday as I'll just be getting off a plane from Asia 10pm the night before the event... Woot jet lag autox...

So Jet Lag Autox was entertaining... Quite cold with strong wind on a freshly brewer coated surface = ice skating.

Need another day on course to think thru the setup but the rear end of the car was seriously impossible to hold on to.

Started out as normal with rears pressures set to 32 and fronts at 28 to encourage rotation. After the first run and subsequent awesome 60mph smokey 360 it was cler the rear end needed no encouragement. I dropped pressures down over the course of the day eventually having both front and rear at 26. Runs 3 and 5 were the only clean ones of the day but were nowhere near optimal.

Also picked up a fuel starvation bog consistently thru one section of the course that I've never had issue with before. I had half a tank of gas so not sure if more fuel will resolve the issue or not. Need to investigate what the factory baffle system in the tank is doing.

Tons of fun but got murdered by the national level CRX. They were so together all day and were amazingly smooth.

Few pics for you...