Eibach Suspension Upgrades

Hey everyone! I have some cool/good news! So this blog was just something that I started to kind of keep track of what I am doing to the car and potentially help people out doing similar things. As of right now I am averaging about 10 views a day. Woh Kanye, in another 5 years my posts are gonna be blowing up bigger than your ego/wife's butt/temper tantrums (take your pick). Why am I trying to make Kanye relevant again?

Alright enough about Kanye, time to get on to what this post is about, suspension upgrades. I have acquired some suspension components from the very friendly company Eibach. I have the Pro-Plus kit. This kit includes a stiffer front and rear sway bar, and a set of springs that lowers the car 1.3" and has a stiffer spring rate. Right now I have a full stock suspension setup. I also have a handy little accelerometer that I made using and Arduino. At my last autocross I used it to collect my max cornering and acceleration G's.

The data can be found in this photo album:
http://imgur.com/a/4oOUV

So we have some stock data, now what? Well I don't really want to put parts on, take parts off, put parts on, take parts off. My intent right now is to put the parts on one at a time and autocross/track the car and see if the max G's change at all. We are mostly looking at corning G's, but it will be interesting to see if accel or braking ones change with the changes. This is also a very simple A to B comparison. At some point I might be smart enough to get my code to do yaw rate and things like that (not even sure right now if the accelerometer that I have will even support that). So take what I do with a grain of salt because it isn't showing the whole picture, but I figured it would be awesome to collect some data and actually show people if any differences occur.

As of right now I have swapped out the front sway bar as that seems to be what everyone says the first suspension upgrade should be. I am a sheeple so that is what I have done.  I have autocrossed with the new sway bar, but due to my own stupidity I forgot the SD card to log data. So that will have to wait till I get a chance to find an empty parking lot or another autocross. The sway bar has definitely decreased the body roll of the car in cornering. At some point I will do some math for you guys to get roll bar spring rates of the stock and Eibach one. I will likely do some other math down the road to do with springs and what damping rate I want. But I gotta learn how to math again first.

One caveat with the springs is that the higher spring rate is likely too much for the stock dampers (not to mention the dampers have 120k miles on them). So when that upgrade happens, there will likely be a damper change too. So count it, that will be TWO things that change at once. Maybe I will put the springs on with the stock dampers for a run just for the hell of it, who knows. I am making it up as I go as always.

Alright enough blabber, time for me to brag about my girlfriend who I forced into driving for the first time at the last autocross. Her times were closer to mine than mine were to the next guy in my class...crap (for me that is). Her fastest run can be found here, look for the pretty and brand new Jag:

Zahra's First Autocross

Hard Dog Hard Core M2 Roll Bar Install

Well this past weekend I obtained and installed my roll bar. The thing probably weighs more than all of the weight I have taken out unfortunately, but safety first right? Well before I get to the installation of the bar I am going to review it just a little. Overall the install was pretty easy. I had most of the interior removed before getting it so I got to skip the steps of taking out the carpet and some other plastic pieces. Without running into any serious problems I put the bar in with some help from my dad in about 5 hours from start to finish. The instructions are kind of vague so hopefully my write-up can help someone in the future. There is a youtube video I found of some guys putting one in and it was a nice visual.

With the bar installed, my soft top still works perfectly. My 99' has the glass window too. My one complaint is that I have probably made the car more dangerous for myself personally by putting this bar in. Because I am rather tall for this car (6' 0") I sit with the seat all of the way back and with some recline to keep my head lower. Even with this, my head is maybe a little more than an inch under the top portion of the main hoop. That isn't even the part that concerns me the most. With the seat all the way back, the head rest actually lies behind the side support of the bar. Which means in any sort of collision where my head goes to the side, I am probably going to die from brain trauma. WOOT WOOT, QUICK AND FULL OF PAIN, just the way I like it! They of course make padding for things like this and I am hoping to get a racing seat with side head protection for that and so it will lower me even more. This is my warning to tall people that own this car and want the Hard Core M2 roll bar.

Now to the install. The first thing I am going to say is that in the instructions it does not say anything about removing the seats or the top. While I am sure you can get it done with them in the car, for your own sanity TAKE THEM BOTH OUT! The top on the NB is rather easy to remove and will take you far less time to take off and put on than you will save by trying to do everything with it on. To take the top off there are three bolts on the drivers and passenger side right behind the door frame and in front of the seat belt reel.

Front three bolt locations

Then along the back of the top on the inside of the car you will see three black strips of sheet metal with a bunch of nuts holding them on. This is what holds the weather stripping tight to the car to keep water out. Remove all of the nuts. After that, there are two more plastic plugs holding the weather stripping to the car. They are located behind where the three bolts were, between the frame and the seat belt. The clips hold a little end piece for the rubber trimming that goes around the car which can now be removed. Once the end caps are off, the top should come out.

Once it is out and you have removed all of the carpet and plastic pieces, and the piece of sheet metal (package tray cover) that has 16 bolts holding it for whatever reason you should have something that looks like this.

Now at this point you can try to put the bar in the car, but it will likely get caught on the battery cable and some other wires that you can't get past on the passenger side. So to get around this I cut out the sheet metal to have a pocket large enough that you could just drop the mounting plate in without having to slide it backwards. You are going to have to cut the sheet metal no matter what, it just depends on how much you want to take out. I cut it using an edge grinder with a cutting wheel. Worked perfectly! The pockets I cut out are shown below.

Now the bar should slide right in. The next step is to bolt the bar to the lower seat belt reel bolt. I put the seat belts back in at this point too.

You can see how the bars fit for the rear mounting points.

Now it is time to start drilling some holes! The first hole for the rear mounts is probably the hardest part of putting this bar in if you do not have the proper tools. I cut the pocket back far enough so I had a direct line of sight for one of the holes on each 'foot'. It is rather deep to get a hand drill in there to drill the hole, so I recommend getting a long drill bit if you can. If not do what I did and use a socket!

Once the first hole is drilled you can bolt the back plate to the other side and use it as a pattern like they say in the instructions. On the passenger side do not forget to pull the evaporation system filter or whatever it is out from its snap in pocket. I also removed the canister that is held on with a 10mm bolt. It lies in front of the calipers. Unfortunately at this point I was getting a little excited and dropped the ball on taking pictures so I don't have any of that. You will also need to jack the back end up and remove the rear wheels and the wheel well plastic guards towards the front of the car.

The rest of the install is as easy as drilling holes and putting bolts through them. My back plates didn't all match up perfectly with the body contour, but once you cinch them down tight it will deform the body to make a flat surface.

Once that is done put it all back together. That evaporation system filter will lose its home to rear passenger mounting plate. I pushed it behind some wires and zip tied it into place. 

The final product:

You can see the seat lies behind the bar when it is pushed all the way back 

So there it is. The first modification to the car. More to come in the future!