1994-2002 [Subscribe to Daily Digest] |
The bearing is basic to the product. Comes with bearings, no washers. The KYB bearing is designed to be self sealing?? The egdes of the bearing rub a bit to provide zero clearance to keep dust out. The outer bits seem to be some kind of plastic. So a bit of friction when turning the wheels is not an issue.
The rubber secion of the KYB unit is much different than the Saab unit. It appears to be more compliant. I will have to see how it feels in hard corners. It does appear to be designed to allow more deflection.
My original 1995 lower washer was fine. These only deform when the top rubber tears to the point where the washer then takes all of the load. I assume that the lower washer could impact the mounts aluminumm casting as a fail safe. Under that situation I can see this being sacrificial.
The KYB unit has much less metal than the Saab unit. A cost cutting measure. So what do you want for 1/2 price plus the bearings? I am sure that they did their home work and that the unit spreads the load to the shock tower as required.
I am keeping my old bearings, they seem to be in good shape.
Also, there has been much concern about the limited travel of the front shocks, before the bump stops are hit. I understand that later production had more travel built in by redesign of the top end. I don't have lowering springs, but I remember the joy of hitting the bump stops with my weak stock springs b4 the koni's.... so for better or worse, I hacked off about 1" of the bumb stop rubbers with some aviation snips. So the difference will not be known unless I whack something pretty hard. With the Koni's I am expecting that they will keep me off the short-stops... bad pun. So I did remove the soft end of the stop, so when it does engage, it will be abrupt. Some of the top end could alternatively be sawn off or removed with a course disk sander. This might be better. The removed bottom end could be shapped with a sander as well to engineer its shape... but I did not do that.
And with the koni's, it seems impossble to torque down the top nut. One can easily get the koni supplied lock nut flattened, but the shock shaft then simply turns in the mounts, Saabs or Koni's. The KYB unit has a key-way in its bore but there is nothing to utilize that. So I did put lots of loctite blue on that nut as well. On the LH unit where the shock tube nut was loose I also noticed some signs of movement which suggested that the shaft was not tight enough at the top. I don't know if an impact wrench would to anything but turn the shock shaft. It does not have much moment of inertial to create resitance. Maybe someone will advise otherwise. When I removed the LH top nut, I did not notice that the nut felt loose in any way.
I also experimented with things a bit. I removed the top nut, WITH the vehicle weight on the tires, then lifted the vehicle allowing the shock shaft to drop down through the upper mount. The spring then extends as this is done. The tie rod end will hit its lower opening edge and limit travel. If the tie rod taper shaft is released, then the travel will be limited by the rubber brake line and the ABS sensor wire. So this was a dead end venture. However I did determine that the spring gets to the point of loosness. So if someone had asssembled the strut so that the lower end of the spring was not seated against its indent and bent up steel stop, the spring could be manipulated into postion in this fashion. I guess if the caliper and ABS sensor were released, and the sway bar pivot removed, it might be possible to drop things far enough to R&R the strut top without popping the ball joint. One would need to know that the shocks were not needing to be replaced. So further investigation of this will have to wait for someone else. The spline shaft nut still would have to be removed and attention paid to not pull the spline from the trany. So what would the the potential merit of this. Avoid popping the ball joint, which can be a pain, and avoid using a spring compressor.
posted by 208.24.17...
, Mon, 28 Jan 2002 09:05:58
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