Guy

I was doing some final tweaking to my ride height prior to getting an alignment. The driver rear strut is taking a ton of adjustment and is still lower the the passenger side even though there is an inch difference in exposed threads from one side to the next. I am fairly certain something is amiss with that strut. I was going to swap out a set of BILSTEIN (green) from my 81 parts car. The parts car is not easily accessible. Should I go thru the hassle, or just use another pair of BOGE that I have on the shelf?

Tom in Austin

Bucks County? How far are you away from Stan, that's who I'd ask to look at it ...

Guy

Stan will be doing the alignment. The spring is shot. Not sure how or why but that's definitely where the problem lies.

dr bob

Take a look at the opposing corner. It's easily possible to have two opposing corners carrying "extra" weight if you aren't careful. It's tougher to see in the fronts since the inner sleeve usually fits up inside the collar at least on Boge and Koni dampers. On those, use a thin pocket scale or a wire to make sure they are adjusted the same side to side.

Coil springs don't fail arbitrarily by just getting weak, assuming they are the same age side to side and have seen roughly the same duty. When there's a serious compressed-length mismatch as you describe, something is wrong, maybe someplace else, that's causing what you see.

Guy

Thanks Dr Bob, you make some good points. My front heights are equa side to side (non adjustable). The rear passenger side easily adjusted right to spec with a few turns. The driver side was practically loose and could nearly be turned nearly by hand when I started. It took over an inch on adjustment just to get it to start making a change. In the end it was 10mm lower than the passenger side but the amount of threads showing was triple. Perhaps the first owner was a large person

I removed the driver side rear assembly last night and will swap out my spare tomorrow. Everything looked normal coming apart. I am really tempted to do a full overall on both sides with repaint and replating but that will put the car off the road for some time and selfishly I want to log some more miles on it before embarking on a another tear down.

So I will do a down and dirty swap for now. Gather parts for replacement and new hardware for plating over the winter. It will mean two alignments but I am okay with that.

Guy

This is the shock assembly causing my issues. This is what I love about this car, 72k and lots of nice original parts. Just could not get the height out of this one. See how far up the adjuster currently is?

Mrmerlin

time to take both rears off and check the unloaded spring height go to the WSM for actual measurements. its possible the spring was damaged by a enthusiastic flat bed driver, or someone tried to heat the spring to get a lower ride height

dr bob

^^^ What Stan recommends. That will give you a chance to compare the gas pressures in those two shocks at the same time.

If you don't see a difference there at the rears, the next logical step is pulling the fronts and doing the same spring free-length comparison.

Guy

Thanks Guys. That s a great idea that I didn't think of. I missed this post last night and installed the replacement shock last night

I was able to adjust the rear to around 24 inches measured st the wheel well and 166mm at the member. The driver side is still a few hairs lower than the passenger side but well within spec when measured from the points on the suspension member. I seem to get diminishing returns trying to go higher to the 173mm that the WSM specifies. The car just doesn't seem to want to go that high. I have about an inch of threads exposed.

The camber is off slightly on the driver rear so it appears lower than it is