hawk911

Wachuko told me the 964s can be lowered by adjusting something on the suspension. I'd like to lower the car a bit, but don't want to spend a few grand doing it. If I have to change shocks next year, then I may entertain the idea, but for now this is just a question.

Jaime- how did you suggest I do that? Others might have comments on your thoughts.

Chris M.

I know this can be done on the older torsion bar cars but I didn't know it could be done on the 964 and later models.
Jaime, enlighten us.

c

Indycam

Hiya
If you look at your shocks and struts you will see a spring perch that is adjustable . The peach is threaded onto the body of the shock and strut . By spinning the perch up or down you can move the
body up or down . The spinning of the perch sets up the corner ballance also . IE , don't try to set them yourself unless you realy know what you are doing . Its not a simple thing to get " right " , and a very easy thing to get wrong .

Oddjob

And the range of adjustment on the stock strut/shock lower spring perches is very limited. You will not be able to raise/lower the car very much at all - the factory adjustment is really only for corner balancing.

But go ahead and pull the wheels off and take a look at where they are set. If they at/near the upper limit, you can probably drop the car a 1/2" or so. So you dont mess up the corner balance, make sure that you lower the perches the same number of turns. And thats really only important for axle pairs (move the fronts together, and the rears together - front to rear is less critical).

springer3

Do a search on "ride height". The front crossmember bolt is the reference for the front height. The rear reference is behind the trailing arm, and is only a crease in the pan stamping. That is hard to find even if you know where it is (dirt will easily hide it).

I am not sure why Oddjob thinks front to rear is less critical. The wind comes from the front. It is very important not to set up nose high.

I got mine set at the minimum of the factory range using the original springs. I am happy with the results, but it is a street-only car. The nose gets scraped even at factory settings, so lowering a street car will invite more damage to the underbody.

Oddjob

Corner balancing has nothing to do with wind(?) or aerodynamics.

Indycam was pointing out that the perches are for adjusting corner balance, and that you can throw the corner balance off by adjusting the perches improperly. I was explaining a technique of adjusting the perches so you do not alter the corner balance.

If you know the car is corner balanced, you can raise or lower the fronts together and or the rears together w/o throwing the corner balance off - but you need to match the number of turns of the lower perches/jam nuts. For example, if you lower both front perches 4 turns, and both rear perches 2 turns, the corner balance will not be adversely affected. However, if you lower the front right 2 turns, and the front left 4 turns, the corner balance will be changed (although it would be a small amount).

If you bottomed out all your perches, its likely that your car is not corner balanced very well. Although for a street only car, its not very critical at all.

Wachuko

Sorry, I saw the thread just now...

Pretty much what the others have said... lower by turning the perches... just make sure you do the same amount of turns on both sides

here is a photo:

Tom W

If you lower your car, you really should do a new corner balance and alignment.

RallyDogRacing

I went the no-budget route just to play with it. Dropped each perch by qty:6 half-turns and really didn't get much result in terms of ride height. I did note that at the track I have a more pronouced push in the front end and I still get squealy-tires when making tight low speed turns in my parking garage. Given the correct air inflation I presume I've got the wrong tow as a result of my mucking with the springs...

So when I pull the 155k mile dampers off and put on the used 20k mile units, I think I'll pay for the local artisan allignment guy to do magic... Also I'm headed back to stock ride height for winter.

Jim Michaels

I would not assume that the car was corner balanced before I started turning spring perches. Thus, turning each perch the same number of turns may just leave you with a lower unbalanced car than you started with. As for lowering one end more than the other, that would shift the front/rear balance as well as alter the rear to front downward slope, which is supposed to be about one degree. I agree that the perches are really for corner balancing rather than lowering, but they can be used to lower a very small amount. I'd be sure the scales were handy for corner balancing though. Otherwise one could defeat the purpose of lowering and end up with an even worse handling car.

Oddjob

Realistically, for the guys that are not racing/tracking their cars, you will never notice if the car is corner balanced or not, so dont worry about it. Certainly dont go out and buy $1000 worth of scales to check the street car in the garage. And I would not really recommend spending $4-500 at the local p-car expert for a corner balance either. I would be more concerned about checking the alignment afterwards, but I still dont think that there is enough adjustment in the factory perches to really throw off an alignment that much(?).

It might be a leap of faith, but I would assume that the car comes from the factory with a general/ballpark corner balance - at least all 4 wheels are touching the ground. So if that was my starting point, I would recommend adjusting the perches equal amounts - I would not recommend lowering each individual perch some random/different number of turns than the others because it may or may not have been correct to start with. But with that said, I still stand by my first comment - its not really all that critical for a street car, so dont worry too much if youre off a turn here or there.

If you like the rake of the car, take them all down the same. If you want a little more nose dive, take the front down more than the rear. I will reiterate, if you do lower the front more than the rear, or vise versa, it will NOT adversely effect the corner balance (changing the diagonal weights).

Think about it for a minute: if you have a 3000 lb car that is equal weight on all 4 corners (750 lbs ea), the diagonals weigh and equal 1500 lbs - so it is corner balanced. If you drop the front 1.5" and raise the rear 1 inch (you have to have huge/dramatic height changes to alter the center of gravity of the car), you would probably end up with each rear wheel having 700 lbs on it, and each front having 800 lbs on it, so the diagonals are still equal at 1500 lbs. Front to rear weight bias/distribution is not corner balancing. We are driving the wrong kind of car if we believe that front to rear weight bias causes a problem with handling....

hawk911

Can I put turbo springs on the car; and yes I realize that's changing parts. Will that lower the car, and still give me the handling I need?

pete000

They make drop perches which allow you to get the car lower and continue to use the stock shocks.

When I changed to Bilstiens and H & R springs. I set the perches as low as they would go to start then had the shop bring the car up to corner ballance it and keep it as low as possible. It did raise the car up a bit higher than I wanted to set the ballence though. I am concidering the drop perches to get the car a bit lower and maintain proper alignment. There are suspension set ups available with fully threaded shock bodies, but they are more for full time track use.