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Old 10-24-2007, 08:12 PM   #82
kouki_s14
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those of you who claim Japanese coilovers are better than Koni's READ

http://farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets6.html

Here's a little clip of the site

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dennis Grant
Remember this list:

Bilstein
Penske
Koni
Ohlins
Sachs
Dynamic Suspension

Not on this list? Almost certainly crap.

Perhaps I should elaborate a little.

For a while, I was the shock engineer for a race team, and was designing, building, and rebuilding shock packages for customers. A big part of this service was running customer shocks on the dyno to set a baseline for where they were currently at. I dynoed a couple of hundred shocks, representing the spread of almost every shock brand extant.

(All the shock dyno plots on this page came off my dyno.)

Amazingly, save those brands mentioned in that earlier list, this was a non-stop parade of horror, including, but not limited to:

-Adjusters that did absolutely nothing;
-Adjusters that had more crosstalk effect than they had primary effect (ie, a rebound adjuster where 1 click made a 10% change in rebound and a 30% change in compression);
-Adjusters that were nonlinear and exponential;
-Adjusters that peaked in the middle of the adjustment range (in one example, "full hard" was softer than "full soft");
-Shimstacks assembled upside-down;
-Sets of shocks where a front and rear shimstack had been exchanged;
-Shocks valved with forces that were insane (1600 lbs/in @ 3 in/sec was the record);
-Shocks that faded so fast that no two runs were ever alike;
-Shocks with adjusters that varied by 10% on the same shock at the same setting, depending on if you got there by going harder or softer; and
-Shocks that adjusted rebound and compression in lockstep, but had so much compression that backing them down to reasonable levels made rebound way too soft (very common with the Japanese brands like GAB, JIC, Tein, etc)

The only shock brands I worked with that actually did what they said they would do were the shocks on that list - and even then, they had their quirks:
Learn something before you talk

I'm curious to see what this guy thinks of Zeal, anyone have input on Zeals vs the brands on that list?
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