Anyone used the coilover conversion sleeves?
 

ELEPHANT RACING Coilover Sleeve Conversoin kits, 911 Series


Anyone tried these? How do they perform or relate to torsion bar setup? Installation a pain?

Thanks,

Miles

Not on 911's but I have on other brands of cars. HARSH street ride. The spring is shortened and can't be too progressive at the small length. BUT on a track car they are a VERY good $ saver. The elephant ones have that secondary helper spring so they may give a better street ride than what I used to sell/install.

The helper spring does nothing to the ride of the coil-over. . .its just there so the main spring does not come off its seat when raised, thats it. The ride depends on what spring rates you get. . .street/track? track only but driven to the track, or race only ? Coil over are lighter, easy to adjust ride height, easy to adjust cross weight. They are more race oriented. Ive driven some sweet street track 911 with stock torsion bars just lowered a little bit. Fun and cheap.

Ok thanks! Yeah i had never seen a sleeve kit kinda wondering how they are. I need new shocks at the moment and im looking at either Bilstein sports or Koni sport adjustables. I want something strong so i can play with torsion bars in the future

I see plenty of options for the main springs from Elephant Racing, but who sources progressive springs? Eibach?

Yeah, you can get 2.5" progressives from eibach. I have a couple set on my urquattro. And I did use the threaded sleeves on that car.
Not particularly difficult, but made a huge difference in being able to adjust the balance as well as the height. I ended up finding out that the suspension settings that were fastest were when I had the car raises about an inch or 1.5" ABOVE stock height. Kind of makes sense if you think about what the car was being homoligated for.

Michael

See my post above about coilovers in a 70 911

Not every helper spring is like that. The Bilstein RSR coilovers are different, the helper spring is like a soft 1st stage, after only 1-2cm the main spring starts acting. My 930 is even more sensitive than stock, less harsh than before.



http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1271921760.jpg

Note that with a coil over conversion, both the spring and damping forces now act on the shock mounting point. (with torsion bars, only the damping forces act at that point)

Miles,
I doubt you would notice a difference between properly set up coil overs vs torsion bars. They are both springs. Coil springs are easier to adjust and change. I had a full-blown race car on a 1977 chassis, but frankly the conversion was expensive, not without growing pains, and I had a full cage welded to the upper shock area in the back, and should have tied in the upper front mounts to the cage also.

Anything less than a high horsepower racecar, I'd stick with torsion bars.

Yeah for the use of my car, they are way to expensive for me. The ride height adjustment would be nice but there are other ways to get to that. I autocross my car and do some DEs. I just want to tighten things up a bit.

There's a lot to be said for properly adjusted torsion bars with good dampers.
911s with torsion bars set-up correctly are predictable and reliable.

I understand the benefits of coils over torsion bars but is there really that much difference on our public roads?

YES, there is. There are mainly two reasons why:

Because the way bigger movement range of a coil spring, the response is much smoother

The different geometry of the suspension (strut almost upright)

One example to clarify:

Everyone of us know the bad habit (especially turbos) of our car to buckle the rear under load (full throttle), respectively the heavy reactions on load changes. This reaction is way less with coil overs.

To proceed against this, you must use stiffer torsion bars, but this will end in a harsher ride and even more lost of smoothness (or change suspension geometry at all).


And the benefits you can feel on normal street use as well as on track. If you ever switched to coil overs, you won't recognize your car, completely different.

I dit not say, that a well-balanced torsion bar setup is a bad thing, but cannot reach a coil over equipped car