944 Turbo ride height question

[cpnnz]

My 1986 model 944 Turbo sits very high at the back.
Was wondering if this is normal, or does it look like the front springs may have collapsed a little due to age?
Would it be a good idea to lower the rear to even it up? Or should I be looking to replace the front springs?
Thanks.

[kdjones2000]

The general procedure to set your ride height as low as possible without causing ball joint issues is to set the front (if you can, either by coilovers or cutting you springs) so that the control arms are parallel to the ground with the car at rest.

The next thing to do is to adjust the rear so that your running boards are also parallel to the ground. This is done by adjusting the eccentric bolt on the rear spring arms (for small adjustments) and/or reindexing the torsion bars.

Looking at your car I think that your front suspension is about as low as it can go without having ball joint issues.

Your rear is way too high for a ROW car. Did someone put coilover shocks on the rear to make it so high? I expect that you will have to go through the very painful process of reindexing your torsion bars to get things where they should be.

A method to do this is outlined here: Torsion Bar Re-Indexing

Good luck, Keith

[AaronM]

IMO, the car in the photograph has two problems. The rear is too high and the front is way too low.

[968 GUY]

Front looks lower than stock. Rear looks too high, which may have a little to do with front being lower than rear. Hopefully, just using the eccentric will work. Even then, an alignment is needed. Ifyou can swing it, you may want to do the springs and shocks and bushings and ball joints and tie rods....what I'm getting at is there is a lot of different things to consider when taking on certain tasks.

[cpnnz]

Thanks all for your input. I think I would like to start with the front springs, as the way it is now, it's too low pulling on and off the road as it's prone to scrape if not careful.
Looking under the car, the control arms are far from parallel to the ground, the inner mount is lower to the ground than the outer.
Is it possible to measure the spring to see if it's collapsed?
I can see it would not be all that difficult to remove the strut assembly from the car.
How high do standard springs set it up? does anyone have a measurement from say the edge of the fender to the ground at the front?
Thanks.
Chris

[968 GUY]

I meant that the rear being so high may have a slight effect on the front being so low.
I believe someone added lower springs or cut them.
The spring measurements and ride height are in the TM.

[mueller944s2]

The previous owner of my car had lowered the rear of my S2 for handling so it was sitting kinda funny looking. I recently raised the rear and the front came up slightly as well, I can't explain why but it did. I think stock height is about 65cm all around. The rear is a pain though because of the torsion bars. We didn't do any of that math on the instructions, just basically guessed and got it pretty close. The left and right aren't completely even but we had the spring plate adjustment set all the way up on the left and down on the right (or vise-versa) to level it out. The back looks high to me but it might be because the front is so low. So there's two questions that I would ask. First, who did you buy the car from? If it was some kid then maybe nothing is wrong but he was just retarded (you never know!), and second when you jack the front of the car up do the wheels fall down normally? What I'm asking there is are the springs collapsed to the point where the front of the car is low. Does the front bounce at all? There's my 2 cents, don't know if it'll help but I tried!

[andrew83944]

If you want a pr of stock 944 turbo front springs..Id be happy to give you a pr for free..Not sure what the shipping costs would be..They are the stock 2 dot..

[cpnnz]

Thank you very much for the offer of springs! I have actually ordered a new pair already, but thanks.
Shipping to NZ could be expensive....
Hopefully I'll be riding high again soon.

[jkb58]

Whoa...

Rear is way, way too high. Start there.

[89-944NA]

I believe that there is only about 1/2 - 3/4 of an inch adjustment on the rear spring plates, and your rear is much higher than that, looks like it's time to index the torsion bars. It's a bit of a PITA, but if you follow the link posted above it's not that bad.

Lowering the rear will change the height of the front since the load distribution will change, you may want to bring the back down before you install those springs (unless they are stock springs).