What does adjusting pss10 settings really do?
 

My car came with the pss10 suspension and I absolutely love it. The car feels so tight. Never having had an adjustable suspension I am not exactly sure how adjusting the settings from 1-10 changes how the car handles. From reading on Bilsteins website I know that 1 is softer and 10 is a stiffer setting, but How does that effect under steer/ over steer? Forgive me if this is a dumb question. Thanks.

before you feed under\over steer you will feel the soft\hard difference when you drive it. If you start changing the balance of hard\soft between the front\rear you can adjust the handling characteristics... same idea as with tire pressure\sway bars.. going softer gives you more grip, harder give less grip. With the engine in the rear most run the rear 2 clicks harder, but depends what type of ride you are going for.

phil.

Hi 996scott,
The adjustments (valves) on the PSS10's adjusts the rate at which the fluid (oil) in your dampers (shocks) travels between cavities or how easy or difficult it is for the fluid to move, hence making the suspension hard or soft
This adjusts the bounce and rebound.
PSS10's are coil over dampers and springs, you can also adjust the height by adjusting the spring perch.

.

Scott, in a easy nutshell - remember that the single adjustment alters both "bump" and "rebound" (intuitive terms).

The dampers control, for the most part, the transitional phases of the car's handling; i.e., corner turn in, chassis unloading at track-out, performance over bumps and undulations, and compression up and down larger undulations.

For the street, adjust to whatever is comfortable, yet not too stiff - we're all different here.

On track, start with your street settings for a few semi-hot laps, then dial up until the car feels more "settled" at turn-in (i.e body roll is a bit more controled), run a few more laps.

Then dial up all the way to 10. You may find the car feels even better, but now jumps a bit over the little bumps and on kerbs - dial down a bit until this goes away. This is about the best you can do with the PSS10s.

If yer running full stiff on all 4 corners, and liking what you feel - from there you can fine tune a bit of handling. For us, this normally means turn-in understeer, or power on understeer mid-corner - simply dial out the front shocks a bit to help this.

FWIW, I ran 10R and 9F.

When you're done with all of this, call Steve W. and order a set of MCS dampers, tehe....

Thanks guys, good info. I just have them both in the "middle of the road" at 5 right now. I will start playing with the setting to get a better feel for how the changes the car.

Scott, I have mine set to 4Front and 6Rear as a starting point..Had this set up
for about a week and 200miles..So far so good!!

:biggulp:

my car came with PSS10 and i love it as well.
question is for my first DE ever in the 993, i'm planning on running 1 (softest) all around to get a feel for the rear heavy tendency. any advice on the settings?

Good explanation there.

Better to start from the middle setting on both ends and then start adjusting from there.

But one key point that many fail to do, whether shocks, tire pressures, swaybars or whatever is this:

ADJUST ONLY ONE THING AT THE TIME.

So let's say you start with middle setting on both ends, go out and car understeers a bit, soften the front for example couple of clicks softer, then go out again and see what it does. If you have adjustable sways, start messing with those until you have the car to handle basically the way you want, then fine tune with shocks.
If you adjust front softer, rear harder, sways also etc. you'll never know exactly what did what & how much so...

ADJUST ONLY ONE THING AT THE TIME.

You aren't going to be anywhere near what you even call "fast" street driving at your first track day. Maybe, maybe, maybe you'll get some weight transfer talk toward the end of the day, but I find that premature. It's going to be all about the line, the line, the line. And then more of the line.

What track, what group?

The ability to adjust compression and rebound damping in your suspension. They are tuneable for each respective track for better grip, feedback and if setup correctly, decreased lap times.

Here's what the knob on the bottom of a front PSS10 does:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-e...0/PSS10-fr.jpg

discuss :corn:

Arhhh and they say a picture says a thousand words....................

2 weeks ago I set it to 2(front) and 4(rear) on my 96 4S.. I guess this would be my last setting :)

So by adjusting the setting down to a lower number it will soften the compression and rebound which will give me more grip. So if I have understeer I can reduce it going to a lower setting in the front? Is that right?

To discuss, as I "understand" it.

The graph is a family of curves for each setting on the shock.

0 = a static shock and the origin of each set of 2 curves above and below zero for each setting of the shock.

The horizontal X axis is the velocity of the shock motion in in/sec, as the curve moves to the right the faster the shock is going (higher frequency motion)

The vertical Y axis is the force required to move the shock in pounds, the lines below zero are shock extension (or rebound) and the lines above zero are for shock bump (or compression) force values.

Note: Bilstein usually quotes meters/second in most of their literature and gives one value in newtons per millimeter at 0.5 m/sec (~20 in/sec) as a fraction rebound/bump like "110/60"

It is much easier to compress the shock than to extend the shock. Also note the force increases as the shock velocity increases in either direction. These shocks have a digressive curve in that the rate of increase is non-linear, here decreasing as shock velocity increases.

The lower velocity values (low frequency) have more to do with chassis motion (~ handling) and the high velocity (high frequency) values have more to do with wheel motion (~ ride) and this is why the curve is digressive to separate these functions to a certain extent.

Really fancy shocks like Motons for example can have up to 4 way adjustments, really 2 ways for each shock direction. Shock force values can be essentially adjusted for above and below the digression point for each direction thus controlling chassis and wheel motion separately.

This allows the adjustment of the rate of tire loading on corner entry and exit to affect handling as well as adjustment of wheel motion control to affect the way the wheel goes over bumps.