OP... welcome to the DBG Academy of making your suspension brand new for scrapyard money...
1 Droplinks - less than £20, and check the rear damper using the 'wife' method as described. Potentially you're looking at a sat afternoon's work and less than £80.
2 Refurbing the whole suspension. You have Polys already, so you can either take there car off the road in order to do the suspension work, or
3 Refurbing the whole suspension. Buy everything you need then fit it all on a long weekend.
Clearly option 1 is the cheapest best bet initially; moving to option 2 as you won't have to temporarily own
two of everything until such time as you end up removing the car's existing bits and sending them to scrap, if you follow
So, let's go with option 2...
-You already own Polys, saved £50 already. You don't need rear ones
-Already have the wishbones. If they're in decent shape/will refurb, you've saved a massive chunk - as little as £50, as much as several hundred. Get some angledrinder wire brushes and some satin black paint, you're at maybe £20
-Buy some
genuine GM bushes - there are the most shocking cost, at £36 the pair. Don't be clever and scrimp here with some for less than a fiver. They will fail very quick and eat your lovely tyres with them.
-Clean up and drill out/attack/burn/chew/dig with bare hands the old bushes out.
-If you feel the need, also change the ball joints. This is personal preference, if no knocking here leave for another day. Cost around £20 for QH or similar decent - up to £40 for GM
-Droplinks/trackrods. ATP on mine at only £34.10 for four lumps of very good quality metal, bargain.
You're at £90, or £110 if you fancy getting some ball joints too.
Now the biiig one...
-Dampers/Shocks. You can fit Bilstein B4s, which I got for £183 for a set fo 4. Shop around, but may end up paying £214. Anything under a bonus. That's the 'gold' service, and effectively the 'best' you can get. (B6 is harder, for the more sporty driver, and you'd want some better springs etc etc, but we're talking here about best compromise between quality and your bank balance so will leave that for now
) You can get perfectly good dampers (ATP) for around £100 for a set of four. It may be you're perfectly happy with your dampers, or know they're only a few years old, who knows. I leave this cost up to you. Worth doing, save you dissembling again next year.
Let's go cheaper dampers, so we're up to £190.
-Get your wishbones, pop to a local greasy garage, and for a can of Carlingsberguinness get the new bushes pressed in.
-Take home, paint in satin black, grease and press in the polys.
-Take off the old track rods and droplinks (or just remove the whole macpherson strut in you're changing this. *
-Fit the new ones (how to fit spring onto a new damper is dealt with elsewhere, but if you can'[t find, just pm me
)
You now have new dampers, droplinks, shiny, fresh wishbones with the
best bushes money can buy, new trackrods, and dampers at the rear too. Drive to local, recommended, decent tyre people for a geometry setup. that's probably around £50
Car transformed, and you'll feel hugely rewarded and proud at the same time, at an all-in price of £240 (up to something like £360 if you get B4s better balljoints etc but that's in your court)
Let us know how you get on!
*it's dealt with elsewhere, so for simplicities sake I've not mentioned about how to temporarily 'preserve' your car's original setup when changing the suspension, Basically involves measuring how far the strut is from the wheel by jamming a socket in the gap. It's dealt with elsewhere, and feel free to ask all you like on the forum as and when you need to know - and always before you take something off, lest you inadvertantly cock something up
Author
Topic: omega suspension feeling very tired (Read 3145 times)