Project 996 Road Rallye: Part 11

 Aligning the car after the suspension install requires quite a number of steps.  The 911 features a fairly complex number of suspension components unlike the Lotus.  

We first set ride height on the car.  This proved to be fairly straight forward but did require some back and forth.  Our Elephant Racing kit comes with spacers that reposition the suspension to maintain the correct geometry on a lifted car..  We chose to measure ride height from the bottom of the subframe areas as defined by Porsche.

We've decided to use the USA ride heights as a starting point.  See above.  The spacers provided in the kit require subtrating their height (22mm) from the recommended ride height.

On the rear multilink setup, the camber and toe adjusters are on different links, but changing one absolutely moves the other.  The lower control arm (camber arm) changes the wheel’s lateral position when adjusted.  This movement shifts the toe link’s effective length.  The result: camber changes = toe changes.  The front MacPherson strut has camber adjustment at the lower control arm eccentric.  Changing camber alters the scrub radius and control arm position which slightly changes toe. 

We plan to run the car with this set-up and then experiment with higher ride heights.  Unfortunately the process is much more time consumming on a 911 compared with an Elise!  Fortunately we have a Hunter alignment rack that allows us to experiment...

Porsche 964 Refresh

We received a 1992 911 in for a mild refresh.  The owner loves the car and plans to keep it forever.  He wanted us to go through and identify anything that needed repair and address a few items that were bugging him.  The first was the ride quality.  His wife refuses to drive in the car as it is too rough.  Two things were obvious fixes: old tires and blown original dampers.  

The tires were an easy fix but first I attempted to convince the client to go with smaller wheels.  The car came to us with 18" rims vs stock 16".  The consumer market likes cars that have BIG wheels and are lowered.  This car was set up that way.  This owner does not track the car nor drive it overly aggressively.  So I am trying to convince him to consider stepping down to 17" rims to bring back some compliance to this car.

Since the car is not being tracked, we decided to install a set of the Bilstein PSS10s.  These dampers are pretty popular and considered a single adjustable with a clicker located at the base.  This makes them quite easy to adjust with 1-10 clicks.  1 = softest and 10 = hardest.  We are aligning the car with the RS spec ride height but with a stockish alignment.

We also took the opportunity to have the undercarraige dry ice cleaned as it was also nearly as nasty as our 996RR!  The corrosion that we found required a hard brake line replacement as the fitting was frozen.  We changed out all the rubber brake lines as they were original - 33years old!