Sams Polo 3.0

[sambb]

So with the death of my second silver Polo its 3rd time lucky hopefully with another. After a good think, I'll again be more or less be going down the line of getting the suspension and chassis as sweet as I can.

First order of business on the new car will be deciding which suspension to use.

Polo 2.0 had MCA XR coilovers. At the time they were one rung down from MCA's top of the line (for non-inverted coilovers) "Reds". Single adjustable bump/rebound, nice spherical adjustable tops and with independent base height and ride height adjustment. Trouble is since the accident damage was on each of the front corners they need to be sent back to QLD for them to give them the once over to check that they are Ok. They should be but I dont want to be putting them either back in the car or selling them without MCA checking everything is ok first.

So with the MCA's I have 3 options
- get them rebuilt, once over'd, then either run them or sell them $150 each'ish
- get them rebuilt AND revalved so that instead of roughly 1:3 bump:rebound relationship on the adjustment, I could have 1:4 which I think would really help the front $300 each'ish
- if the XR inserts are bent then upgrade to the "Red" inserts $550 each'ish

The other path I can take is to retain this cars KW V3's which are non-inverted like the MCA's but with 2 way bump and rebound adjustment and custom adjustable tops. The trouble with these are that I think they need a full overhaul. There's a clunk from the right front ( I bought the car already informed of that - eyes wide open) which I was hoping was just a shagged drop link but it seems that its deeper than that.

So if I end up deciding that the V3's are the way forward, i'll need to find out where I can get KW gear rebuilt for not eye watering prices.

The final path I could take is to sell off the bulk of the suspension setups that I have, probably retaining whichever rear dampers out of each kit suits the stiff rear springs best and fork out for a front pair of some proper Bilstein inverted 1 or 2 way adjustables, nice and stiff (structurally) and valved nicely for the 6 or 7kg/mm fronts that I want to run. If they'd be appropriately valved for say 6kg fronts, I'd even consider doing what SimonK did and convert some Bilstein non adjustable B8's to coilover if they'd outperform the MCA's or KW's by virtue of the fact that are inverted and would bring a stiffness benefit.

Gary.......are you out there?!?


the reason I want to drop slightly from 7kg/mm fronts to 6kg/mm is because when I have the front apart I'll re fit the Whiteline 22mm front anti roll bar. The reasons for that are that the car was better with it particularly on the track, I will be running clutch LSD's from now on so don't need to obsess over the inside fronts traction like I did with the Wavetrac plus also, down the track when I re-modify some wishbones to take Audi TT ball joints again, i'll also look at converting the front anti-roll bar drop links to run off the wishbones rather than the strut. They'll pick up on the wishbone roughly half way along which to my mind will necessitate a slightly stiffer bar to retain the same anti roll as when they picked up off the strut leg with the stock bar. So given that I'll go back to a 2mm larger diameter front bar again and will still be on the street, I think coming back a notch on front spring rates will still work and make it a touch more tolerable.