All the hypothesizing & a few measurements (thanks, Ryephile) about various spring/shock/bumpstop combinations gets me to wondering: Does anyone have the facility to actually measure what our suspensions are doing? I think I've seen photos from some fancy race-prep shops where they take a spring+strut combo & just make a graph of position vs. force. If you have this graph, (+ an idea of the static load from the car's weight), you could look at it & get a good idea of exactly how non-linear the suspension is. You could see how close it would be to bottoming out, etc. It would sort out differences with linear/progressive springs, etc. Even if you have linear springs, if you use the stock bumpstops, the "spring rate" *will* get progresive at some point - that's a good thing & what the modern "foamy" bumpstops are designed to do. Of course you can get fancier with a shock dyno & start guesing how well damped it will be.

It still seems like almost all of the lowering springs will have you riding well into the bumpstops, so you'll maybe have ~1" of very stiff spring+mostly bumpstop compresion left if you're lucky. Doesn't seem prudent here in pothole county... I just thought it would be really informative to look at different combinations on paper first, if that was possible. Any ideas?

 

Koni has one. I think they'll dyno the shock if you send to them.

 

Yes I do; why didn't I think of that?
I have the H&R springs with stock dampers; now I'm uber-curious.
The machine is at my friend's motorcycle shop but I think it can be used on cars too; I'll get back later with an answer....

 

i test suspensions all day at work sadly though i would be unable to do anything for personal use there though...sorry.

 

I totally forgot about this and just emailed Max at Traxxion about it.
Will update (eventually...)