This is a direct copy and pasted post from this website "http://www.lexusownersclub.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=27280". I by no means wrote this, and this quote was written by Macrs200, a member of that forum. I am NOT taking any credit for his work and diagram. This is what HE wrote to explain the picture above.

"First two from left to right, show suspension "topped out" and "bottomed out" by winding the spring seat up and down.

Middle one shows the spring seat in a mid position with equal travel up and down and low ride height, the next two to the right show the same suspension travel but with medium and and high ride height.

Like I have said in the past I aimed for about a 2/3 up wheel travel and 1/3 down wheel travel. So with 90mm of total travel from "bottomed out" to "topped out" I was looking for for around 30mm of compression on the spring with the weight of the car. That equalled 5mm of pre-compression from the springs "free length".

The IS is a bit heavier than the Tezza so I would go for 10mm pre-compression and adjust the ride height using the bottom mount.

Hope that makes sense"






I thought this was helpful info and thought I'd share it for the ACL members...

 

Since I just received my coilovers I have been researching the proper way of adjusting and setting the coilovers without it affecting it's handling characteristics in a negative way. So since I saw this, I thought what better place to share this info than ACL.

 

Here's some more info I found. Again, not my work, this is a direct quote from









"Well today I used my coilovers as they were meant to be used... to balance the car so that it handles the same turning left as it does turning right. Ironically, getting coilovers can easily make the imbalance of a car worse, since it is difficult to set each spring at the exact same height from side to side.

Unfortunately, you can't change the front-to-rear or side-to-side static weight distribution of your car without physically moving weight/ballast to different locations. However, you can make the car effectively handle uniformly left-to-right by corner-weighting it properly. The goal here is not to make front/rear or left/right weights balanced (since that is impossible to do via coilover adjustments) but to make our cross-weights the same, that is LF + RR = RF + LR.

This may be hard to wrap your mind around at first, so here's a good explanation from http://www.hadamotorsport.com/tech/howto/cornerweights/

"As you enter a corner, weight gets transferred from the inside to the outside wheels. This weight is always transferred diagonally across the car. As an example, the more weight to take off the right-rear tire, the more gets loaded on the left-front tire. So what you say? Well too much weight transfer disturbs the balance of the car and reduces the tire's grip."

With that in mind, I threw my car on the scales at a shop my friend works at. I weighed the car as close to auto-x spec as possible, which meant:
-Rear seats, spare/jack, all floormats, and cargo cover taken out (about 60lbs of stuff)
-Gas guage a little over E
-My 168lbs in it

I didn't want to bother bolting on my 2lbs-lighter race tires, but since they're exactly on each corner I'll just subtract 2lbs from each corner.

1st weigh-in, WITHOUT driver, just to see how much it weighs alone:

LF 781 711 RF


LR 403 460 RR

Total: 2355lbs (sweet... about 50lbs lighter than I had expected and nearly 300lbs less than what Acura lists a stock '98 LS 5-spd coupe as)


Same but WITH me in the car:

LF 837 740 RF


LR 471 475 RR

Total: 2523lbs
LF + RR = 1312lbs
RF + LR = 1211lbs
Difference: 101lbs!!!

If you raise one corner, the weight on that corner increases along with the weight on the diagonally opposite corner. Likewise if you lower a corner, that corner and it's diagonally opposite corner will lose weight. With this in mind I raised the RF by one full turn of the coilover sleeve, and the following happened:

LF 811 767 RF


LR 496 450 RR

LF + RR = 1261lbs
RF + LR = 1263lbs
Difference: 2lbs
Looks like I made a damn good guess!!


So there ya have it, for those interested in using coilovers to their fullest ability. It was nice to be pleasantly surprised by the weight. This means for daily driving with full interior, all safety equipment, plus spare tire and jack, I'm at roughly 2420lbs, and still only at Acura's listed stock weight WITH ME in the car plus a full tank of gas. The weight distribution was also good - with me in the car, it is 62.5/37.5% F/R and 51.8/48.2% L/R thanks to extensive front-end weight reduction... most of my rear weight reduction is race-only, like the rear seats and spare. Still have work to do towards a 60/40% ideal FF weight distribution but still decent. By my approximate calculations, my daily driving weight distribution is more like 61.5/38.5%. Weight reduction, big and small, pays off."










I forgot his name, but I'll edit it later.

 

Thanks Cocoa. Interesting stuff. Makes me wish I had coilovers so I could go play with them.

 

Another bump. Something you guys with coilovers should consider when complaining about ride quality.

 

THATS why u dont buy omnipower, the stroke length is the same for all applications..