KW Variant 2 Coilovers Installed

[Guest]

[Xenonk]

Finished my install this morning... I still anticipate playing with the firmness settings to see what I like, but the height is spot-on. Initial (and very limited) impressions with the coilovers set 2 from firm on all 4 corners were:

 

-much more direct steering response, turn the wheel and the car goes,

-little to no dive on heavy braking and similarly little lift on heavy acceleration,

-even set near the firmer end of the spectrum, these coilovers do not beat you up.

 

So far, I am very impressed.

 

 

for daily driving, it should be set low (as a good designed street coilover should perform well with the road conditions under their softer settings anyways).. you dont want to run over-dampened, especially on rough public roads as you will end up wearing your valves faster. Run them on a softer setting.. every coilover I work on and setup that are used for street are set to near full soft or one level above that.. such as my Zeals, I run on full soft on the street, when it comes time to autocrossing or track events, I just turn them up to no more than level 5.. level 6 is really high on dampening which makes the car feel very unsprung or that the car isnt using the springs anymore to control pitching and weight transfer.. it just feels as if the car stops obeying the weight transferring that you want it to do.

[coolbluelb]

I don't plan on leaving them super firm,I just started there to get an idea of the feel.

[coolbluelb]

Ok, just went out and adjusted all four corners of the KW's to 2 from full soft with interesting results... Straight line driving on a flat surface is nearly identical to stock while still feeling bumps a lot more than the stock setup (not bad or jarring, just more to feel). If running soft will extend the life of the coilover, I will gladly leave it set here for my daily driving needs.

 

The biggest difference I noticed between near full-soft and near full-hard was the amount of body roll, with full-hard maintaining nearly complete flatness on cornering and full-soft allowing much more (but still far from the boat-like quality of the stock set up).

 

For reference, this is the only suspension mod I have performed to the car, and I am still running stock rubber.

[Magic]

I deffinately need to come drive that thing, between the clutch and the coilovers....

[LittleBlueGT]

The biggest difference I noticed between near full-soft and near full-hard was the amount of body roll, with full-hard maintaining nearly complete flatness on cornering and full-soft allowing much more (but still far from the boat-like quality of the stock set up).

 

Body roll should not really be affected by dampener valving. It may transition from side to side faster and reach X amount of body roll quicker with less dampening, but the ultimate amount of body roll on a steady state turn is a function of the spring rate.

 

 

Keep the review coming, I am likely buying a set tomorrow!

[coolbluelb]

Driving time has been limited post install due to other ongoing "projects". I will continue to report my subjective impressions. One thing is clear, the KW's will not be an issue for daily driving.

[Xenonk]

just remember that you can adjust the valving to be different from front to rear to maintain some body roll so that you dont overload the tire's grip capacity (unless you're a really good driver).. there's nothing wrong with setting the rears to be a little bit stiffer than the front if you want the car to help you to rotate a little bit more.. but if you want a tighter feeling car, you can always turn up the fronts a tad more than the rears to help some of the flatter turn-ins... play with a little bit of that and you'll notice a few things as well.