Jump to content
SAU Community

Recommended Posts

Sooooo its time to decide on some coilovers? my 34gtt is road registered with track days involved. Im currently running bilstein struts but they are starting to leak/knock and id rather get something new. With that being said im after some feedback on silk road coilovers if you have personally run a silk road set up or have any links to reviews on them it'd be a great help ✌

Link to comment
https://www.sau.com.au/forums/topic/473259-another-coilover-debate/
Share on other sites

15 hours ago, lizzy176 said:

Sooooo its time to decide on some coilovers? my 34gtt is road registered with track days involved. Im currently running bilstein struts but they are starting to leak/knock and id rather get something new. With that being said im after some feedback on silk road coilovers if you have personally run a silk road set up or have any links to reviews on them it'd be a great help ✌

Bilsteins can be reconditioned.

41 minutes ago, KiwiRS4T said:

Bilsteins can be reconditioned.

While that's true, and I still prefer my Bilsteins to coilovers.......the cost of rebuilding them is almost as much as buying new ones which is almost as much as buying coilovers.  So it's hard to convince most people of the benefits.

Thanks for the response, im aware bilsteins can be recondtioned but im after something more adjustable and different. Have tried a few different brands in other cars ( BC, HSD, Gab etc.) A few friends have mca's so ill check in with them.

MCA's are the bees knees.

Bilsteins can get reconditioned (I asked about mine recently) for something around ~500 for all 4. So still considerably cheaper than buying a set of $2500 coilovers from MCA.

Heasmans in Syd (Bilstein Australia) are the only people I could find who would rebuild and revalve shocks. Great to deal with, even to the point where I sent photos over the course of a few weeks to find out if they were leaking, for them to say yep, don't worry - save your money when they could have easily have done the job.

 

Who did this for you and how comprehensive was the rebuild/revalve?

Revalving and regrooving of front shock was done by heasmans, disassembled, revalved, with dyno before and after. The front shocks were also shortened to make sure the front springs stay captive, running 9kg/mm springs, rears I just used helper springs
Bilstein rear shocks are the insert type, I just ran GTR ones which are shorter already with higher rates than GTSt bilsteins anyway, running 6kg/mm

I bought the sleeves/ springs/ bump stops/ tops etc separately with sleeves and spring seats from US and assembled it myself to keep it within budget

My thing is my spring rates are increasing - now 6kg front and rear on a 32 GTR.  At some point the valving will be wrong/less than optimal for the spring rate and the shocks will need revalving.

Can you throw any light ont he kinds of ranges the one set of valving can cope with in terms of spring rate?  So say the are optimized for N kg/mm front spring but can cope with anything between N-M kg/mm and N+M kg/mm.

  • Like 1

I can't be precise......but I effectively have GTR springs on my R32.  About 5.5 kg/mm at the front and about 4 at the rear.  I have SK modified B6s on my car and they work really well with those springs.  But I used to have off the shelf B6s using springs that were only a bees dick less stiff and they were also fine.  I can tell that SK's revalving is worth having, but it's not like it's the difference between them working and not working.  It's more about the quality of teh damping than the absolute quantity, if you know what I mean.

So, on that basis, I would suggest that off the shelf B6 valving will more than likely have no problems at all handling 6 kg/mm springs.  The beauty of the valve stack on good dampers like Bilsteins is that they can actually handle a very wide range of spring rates.  Have a read of SK's sticky damper thread for a refresh if it's been a while.

If chickluvit has gone all the way up to 9kg springs at the front, I'm not at all surprised that B6s would need different valving.  Those spring rates are a loooong way from what Bilstein would have intended the dampers to work with.

Yeah hard to know as you are dealing with five different things on each damper high and low speed setting for bump and rebound and also the knee point for the curve. I wouldn't mind seeing the output from a shock dyno just to see what changed in going up in spring rate.

For what its worth the rebound damping on the front feels a little soft.  Not sure why.

I thought mine were too.  SuperPro/Whiteline adjustable urethane in OEM arms.  Upon removal to fit the new GKTech awesome sauce FUCAs, I discovered exactly how bad they were.  Outer and inner bolts were a looooooong way from parallel due to urethane bushes being well out of shape.  Unsurprisingly, the car drives a lot better since.

Yeah hard to know as you are dealing with five different things on each damper high and low speed setting for bump and rebound and also the knee point for the curve. I wouldn't mind seeing the output from a shock dyno just to see what changed in going up in spring rate.
For what its worth the rebound damping on the front feels a little soft.  Not sure why.

FYI here’s my result before and after revalve
IMG_4644.jpg

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now


  • Similar Content

  • Latest Posts

    • Even more fun, leave all the ADAS stuff plugged in, but in different locations, hopefully avoid any codes!   And honestly, all these new cars with their weird electronics. Pull all the electronics out Duncan, and just shove an aftermarket ECU and if needed a trans controller in, along with a PDM. Make it run basic but race car styled!
    • To follow up a question from earlier too since I had the front bar off again (fking!) This is what is between the bumper and the drivers side wheel And this is the navigator side, only one thing but its a biggy! So basically....no putting coolers in the wheel arches without a lot of moving other stuff. Assuming I move to properly race prepping this car I'll take that job on and see how the computers respond to removing a whole bunch of ADAS modules
    • So I prepped the car for another track day on Wednesday (will be interesting to see coolant temps post flushing out and the larger reservoir, with a forecast of 3-14 being 20o cooler than last time I took it out). Couple of things to mention; since I am just driving the car and not taking a support vehicle, I took the rear seats out and just loaded the back up Team Trackday style. Look at all that space! To cover off removing the rear seat....it is weird (note the hybrid is probably different because it wouldn't have folding rear seats) Basically, you remove the lower seat base, very similar to a r series but it is a clip that pulls forward to release the base rather than it being bolted down. Easy Then, you need to remove the side section of the rear seat on each side. There is a 14mm head nut at the bottom of the side piece, the it slides upwards off a hook at the top to release; you also need to unhook the seatbelt from the loop at the top. Then the centre piece is weird. You need to release/fold the seats forward with the tab in the boot on each side From there, there are 2,x12mm headed bolts holding the rear of each seat to the folding bracket, under the trim between the rear seat and the boot (4x christmas tree clips there, they suck). The seat is out but you can see where the bolts attach to the bracket
    • As discussed in the previous post, the bushes in the 110 needed replacing. I took this opportunity to replace the castor bushes, the front lower control arm, lower the car and get the alignment dialled in with new tyres. I took it down to Alignment Motorsports on the GC to get this work done and also get more out of the Shockworks as I felt like I wasn't getting the full use out of them.  To cut a very long story short, it ended up being the case the passenger side castor arm wouldn't accept the brand new bush as the sleeve had worn badly enough to the point you could push the new bush in by hand and completely through. Trying a pair of TRD bushes didn't fix the issue either (I had originally gone with Hardrace bushes). We needed to urgently source another castor arm, and thankfully this was sourced and the guys at the shop worked on my car until 7pm on a Saturday to get everything done. The car rides a lot nicer now with the suspension dialled in properly. Lowered the car a little as well to suit the lower profile front tyres, and just bring the car down generally. Eternally thankful for the guys down at the shop to get the car sorted, we both pulled big favours from our contacts to get it done on the Saturday.  Also plugged in the new Stedi foglights into the S15, and even from a quick test in the garage I'm keen to see how they look out on the road. I had some concerns about the length of the LED body and whether it'd fit in the foglight housing but it's fine.  I've got a small window coming up next month where I'll likely get a little paint work done on the 110 to remove the rear wing, add a boot wing and roof wing, get the side skirt fixed up and colour match the little panel on the tail lights so that I can install some badges that I've kept in storage. I'm also tempted to put in a new pair of headlights on the 110.  Until then, here's some more pictures from Easter this year. 
    • I would put a fuel pressure gauge between the filter and the fuel rail, see if it's maintaining good fuel pressure at idle going up to the point when it stalls. Do you see any strange behavior in commanded fuel leading up to the point when it stalls? You might have to start going through the service manual and doing a long list of sensor tests if it's not the fuel system for whatever reason.
×
×
  • Create New...