russje

So I installed the Ford Racing 1.5" lowering springs, Steeda Heavy Duty front strut mounts, and Tokico D-Specs. The install was pretty straight forward, I've lowered a few cars now. Always on jack stands, and it's not bad.

The pic in my sig, is the last one I took before I did the suspension after I got my take offs.

The lowering springs are obviously way shorter, these are the fronts


Here's a pic of the front strut assembled together.

(please note in the pic above the Steeda HD mounts are twisted out of position, do not use this as a final assembly reference. The instructions specify the Steeda logo points out away from the car)

Here's an after pic



Took it down the street for a $91 alignment and it's good to go. More pics to come, dropping it off today at a body shop to have CS GT bumpers put on front and rear. It's not a handling mod, but it should look cool.

Blair

I can't see any pics

sp44

nice!

cdown16

When you got your alignment, does the shop adjust the camber on the HD strut mounts for you?

russje

I'm not sure all shops are the same, but I went to talk to the tech who was doing my alignment. I just told the tech, what I did, replaced struts, springs and strut mounts. SO I said "most of the aligment will probably need to be corrected in the front strut bolts, and the camber plates up top.

The guy replied no problem and I started waiting. After less than an hour, the guy commented he never did an alignment job so easy, and commented that the camber plates made it all real easy. I think if you are up front with them, they don't have to try chasing where to adjust the alignment. Last thing he said was I did a real good job of eye-balling alignment I was only off 1 degree from left to right. Pure luck, but compliments are nice.

Norm Peterson

Just think - if you'd had a digital angle finder and a level place to do the work on, you could have gotten the cross-camber within 1/4° and been pretty sure it was that good, going in.

Even if you don't trust your own DIY alignment capabilities for long-term set it and forget it driving, a DIY shot at this will at the very least buy you a bit more time between doing the suspension mods and arranging to get it professionally aligned.

You have definitely found a good shop, or at least a good tech and I'd guess a good service writer. Lots of places seem to prefer that customers not get involved in discussions with the techs, and lots of techs are content to let customers' technical thoughts go in one ear and straight out the other without any pause in between.


About the only thing I'll suggest is to double-check the torque on the strut to knuckle fasteners. The torque value varies depending on whether you have coarse or fine thread bolts, and those numbers might be in a thread here someplace (my company's IT department won't let things like the FSM get installed on my work computer). From best memory, 140-something for the coarse-thread, 160-something for the newer fine-thread.


Norm

Sleeper_08

Pretty good memory Norm - it is 148 for the old coarse thread bolts and 166 for the new fine thread ones.