For the last 3 or so years I have been using a coilover setup that is woefully inadequate. The shocks were a set of old Carrera's that I received in a box when I purchased the car. They worked, but they had some issues. I had no clue what the valving was, they were mounted in the typical 510 fashion (poly bushing on the bottom and bayonet on the top) and one of them had recently started to leak. I decided to upgrade to a Koni 30 series damper, similar to what can be found in the Ground Control kit. I did this for multiple reasons, but the main one is that circle track parts have a very good industry support, so if I decide to upgrade/change valving in the future this should be pretty simple. With this though I wanted to make some changes. Where the coilover mounts to the control arm people typically use a poly bushing to slid over the stud. If you have ever looked at one of these bushings while the car is on the ground you can see that they deflect a pretty good amount under the weight of the car. I wanted to use a solid mount on this end. If you have ever measured the stud that the shock mounts to on the control arm you will find that it is about an RCH over 5/8”. I figured if I mounted a 5/8” spherical bearing on the end of the shock shaft (typically with circle track shock uses a 1/2” spherical bearing here) I could hone down the stock shock mount to fit. So I purchased a couple 5/8 spherical bearings and the associated weld cups and modified the normal Koni shock shaft mount to come up with this.




For the upper mount I wanted to forgo the stock bayonet style mount and use the 1/2” spherical bearing on the Koni shock. To achieve this I cut out the old shock tower top and made a new one to accept a 1/2” through bolt.




This all ended up taking a little longer than expected because I got into a pretty bad case of “while I'm in here.” I ended up stripping all the undercoating from the rear wheel wells, the paint from the trunk floor and rear seat area (both areas were pretty ugly), stitch welding the shock towers, and redoing the plumbing on the rear half of the fuel system. In the end though it was all worth it, and the rear interior area of my car is much prettier.
Back to the coilover install. My initial impressions are very positive. I have the shocks set at the softest of their 4 settings and the car feels very well balanced. Mid-corner bumps have a much smaller affect on the attitude of the car in it feels much better in transition. I was also a bit concerned that the solid mounts would be a bit clunky, but things have been silent so far. I'm looking forward to seeing how these perform at the first auto-x of the year in about a months time.