**The Importance of Choosing the Right Coilovers**

When modifying your car's suspension, it's essential to choose coilovers that not only look great but also improve the car's handling and responsiveness. With so many options available online, it can be overwhelming for consumers to make an informed decision.

As a driver, you'll definitely notice the difference when switching from one setting to another. Coilover tuners like us have the ability to manipulate the shock to achieve various results, but this also means we can make it worse if not done correctly. That's why consumers need to be careful about what coilovers they choose.

**Understanding How Coilovers Work**

To better understand how coilovers work, let's take a closer look at the piston and its role in restricting oil flow. The piston has two small holes on either side, which act as bypasses around it. This allows for a controlled flow of fluid, essential for maintaining the car's balance.

We use this knowledge to adjust the damping according to the dyno settings. By opening or closing these holes, we can increase or decrease the force of the shock. This is done by turning a knob, which makes adjustments easier and more precise.

**The Significance of Choosing the Right Coilovers**

When shopping for coilovers online, it's easy to get caught up in their aesthetic appeal. However, consumers need to prioritize functionality over looks. Ask manufacturers questions about the piston type, orifice size, and shock design to ensure you're getting a high-quality product that will improve your car's handling.

**The Consequences of Choosing Incorrect Coilovers**

Lowering your car without proper coilovers can result in decreased responsiveness and increased wear on other suspension components. Cutting OEM springs is also a bad idea, as it compromises the car's stability.

**Conclusion**

Choosing the right coilovers requires careful consideration of their design, functionality, and impact on your car's handling. By understanding how they work and prioritizing performance over aesthetics, you can ensure that your modifications result in a better-driving experience.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enKhoi lowers everybody wants them but not everybody knows what's in them or why you need them you know who does no OD Bakshi you know he trips but he also makes quite a view so he's gonna walk us through basically what we have to think about before we even start putting them together tweet so yeah let's go through it a coilover is not just the shock it's the spring and the shock so we have to choose the right spring and then we have to build a shock to suit the car and to suit the spring rate that we chose as well some shocks already have a spring around the shock so it's technically like a shock and spring all in one but a coilover usually allows you to adjust the preload of the spring which changes the ride height that changes the droop it's a tuning factor that you get from a coilover we can make it all accessible as one unit that usually is very helpful on a race car where you're constantly changing things out changing maybe even the spring altogether it's one unit you pull it out you could change the components put it back in this is a coil over from a Nissan 240sx this is a Macpherson style shock that is a coil over with spring preload adjustability meaning that these locking collars could preload this spring more or less this whole coil over system is the upper control arm and the shock this kind of has a pretty big task it's got to be structurally sound to take side loads and not buckle not bend and ask to have a good solid top mount because there's no pro controller what's cool about most coil overs out there is that you can adjust spring preload it does change the ride out of the car but it also adjusts how much suspension droop you have how much compression travel you have and if the coilover kit has this neat feature like this one he could adjust the ride height of the car by simply turning the lower mount in or out so you can make the shock longer or shorter not all coil overs are designed like that a lot of them this lower mount is permanently fixed to the shop body and this is all you can adjust mm-hmm yep if you only allow the customer to adjust ride height by digesting in preload you're kind of confined to of like a small range of adjustment because if you want to lower the car a lot and the only way you could do that is by taking spring preload out what's gonna happen essentially let's just exaggerate this as soon as the car hits the ground touches the ground oh my god this is a stiff shot this is a racing car shock I can't compress this yeah what's gonna happen is the springs gonna come down a lot the shock itself is gonna come down and and travel meaning that this shaft is gonna get dangerously close to the bump stop it's all gonna be compressed just statically as the car sitting on the ground just from the weight of the car yeah because you want it to be low and that's the only way you could make it lows by taking spring preload out now when you hit a bump you don't have much travel left and you have an excessive amount of droop meaning that when you put the car up in the air or if it's over a bump the wheels are gonna droop out a whole bunch and I know that some of our customers want to lower their car a whole bunch and I don't want them to have to sacrifice shop performance so this is why you could adjust right here without changing the spring feeler we've got a helper spring and we call it to me yeah exactly the helper spring is very useful if the mainspring is very stiff because if car hits the bump it's gonna compress the shock and then on the upstroke it's gonna want to oscillate upward and if there's not enough mechanical movement left to go upward it'll top out the shock and it'll probably be violent and lift the wheel off the ground it's a placeholder if I remove this the mainspring would jiggle around it wouldn't locate properly on the spring seats so this helper spring is basically like someone just holding the spring in place you could literally compress this by hand the whole point of this helper spring is to keep the mainspring located in its correct place so this is basically the shack of this coil over yep exactly this is that important piece of the puzzle that controls the damping inside the cartridge you get the shaft that travels in and out of it at the end of the shaft you have a piston as the piston goes through the cartridge the oil on one side of the piston needs to make it to the other side so it flows through these offices and as it flows through those offices we restrict oil flow by putting these spring steel shims on here we basically cover up those offices with these shims and these shims have a spring rate to them so on compression stroke the shock as it goes down it flows through the bigger orifices on the rebound stroke it flows through the smaller ones this stack of shims is for the compression side this side is for the rebound stroke two completely different stacks because we need a completely different mount of force on the compression side and a completely different amount of force on the rebound side so this stack sits inside the tube these will Bend yep to change the speed with which it can compress yeah it's basically these are flexing open and once they flex open fluid could pass through so the top during compression these are the ones that Bend up exactly that is awesome that you picked up on it this is called a compression stack because this is the stack of shims that's responsible for opening up to let fluid pass during the compression stroke on the rebound rebound these guys been exactly through this side channel exactly yep a large piston is your friend because a lot of surface area is easier to create that resistance for you know the shock just to follow through it's easy to create a lot of force so on at we talked if you're dealing with a small piston and you try to create a lot of resistance it just generates a lot of heat we're getting into the shocks compressing it is we're doing a lot of work and we're creating a lot of heat do the fluids adjust to that so the biggest important factor with shock fluid for a shock tuner like our company is the viscosity index of the fluid you could use thinner fluid in a shock it'll make it softer sometimes if you're having trouble getting the right force out of it with stacking shims another trick is to use a different viscosity of fluid to begin with that's really what separates one shock from another how much time a manufacturers spent at the racetrack or on the shock dyno figuring out what configuration of these shims work best with what type of piston for any specific car and specific driving disciplines and styles now that we know what goes into all of these only the mad scientist is going to show us how he tested out all these crazies and shocks it's shocking it's a shock yep this saves us a ton of time because we could strap a shock in here and kind of run it through similar paces that it would see on a vehicle the magic behind the valving is that we custom tailor it to produce a different amount of force at a different speed you can manipulate that shock in so many different ways and one way to double check your work if you actually get did it right is to run it on a shock diner all right let's run it cool so let's run at five different velocity increments it's gonna warm up for 10 seconds just a quick warm-up and then it's gonna go into one inch per second which is a very slow speed this is the kind of speed that is responsible for the car just slowly shifting weight from one side to the other maybe getting on the brake and a little bit of dive also accelerating a little bit of squat now it's getting to the high speed this is when you hit a pothole or rumble strip at the racetrack and it's kind of jolting the shock through a faster shock shaft speed the top is the amount of compression force the force is displayed right here on this axis you have the velocity so we ran it pretty fast it was recording up to 16 inches per second actually for this test we did it quite a few different speeds that really helps because it paints a picture of the shock so this is called like the damping curve and as it goes faster as the shock shaft speed increases if it starts to actually produce a little bit less force with higher shock shaft speed it's not increasing force in a linear fashion it's digressive lee shaped same thing on the compression side it's pretty steep at the very low speed compression that's because we're dealing with a large piston it's got a lot of surface area to crack those shims loose and open them up it's taken a lot of initial force to do that we could make this initial part of the graph mellower by increasing the amount of lead holes or increasing the size of the bleed hole part you're gonna make the shock as soft as it can be so just turn it counterclockwise this clicks and basically it will stop turning and that's when you know it's at full so here's the graph of the shock full soft and it is yeah yeah so it's still not linear but man we took a lot of force out of it the green is the shock at a stiffer setting the blue line is at the softer setting this is a one-way adjustable shock meaning that we only have one knob to adjust and that one knob in our shocks adjusts the compression side and the rebound side as well the shape or the curve is kind of similar between you know being very stiff and very soft the curve of this graph is something that we designed like we could make this particular shock be progressive we don't want that like for this particular application we wanted it to have a slightly digressive curve we wanted the compression to be fairly linear from like mid speed to high speed we want it to have a little kick at the very beginning and progressive means we'd look like that yeah yeah means we would have less force on rebound at slower speeds and more yep yep so I went from 516 to 619 you will definitely notice that as a driver going from one setting to the other we got a lot of wiggle room to make some really cool changes but if you don't know what you're doing when you're putting a shock to you could really make the car handle worse than it did from the factory and that's where the consumer has to be pretty careful about what coilovers they choose because as a coilover tuner you have the ability to manipulate the shock to do various things you just got to understand that you can make it worse or you can make it way better and so we adjusted the damping for the dyno nobody's gonna walk us through what we just did when we were talking about the piston and how it restricts oil flow we could actually I pass the piston there's two little holes there's one right there another on right there and what that is it's a bypass around the piston it's kind of like the gardener knows out your house you know you could open it up so you get like a little stream coming out or if you really want to blast something you open it up full full blast so that's essentially what you're doing it's also pretty crazy to think that this hole is responsible for a hundred pounds of pressure on recoil yes it seems like insignificant size right it's like a three millimeter hole and there's two of them so it's six millimeters of total orifice but there's a ton of fluid that you could run through there and it kind of sit this is about where it sits right yep so you're out it goes through the hole and then you're closed yep and it goes around it so you could keep track of how how much you're opening it or how much you're closing it we made it so there's indents so as you turn there's an indent we also call that a click so when your friends are like hey adjust the clickers or how many clicks soft or hard you are that's what they're referring to third so what that's doing is basically allowing us to instead of going inside the shock and taking a shim out or changing the piston size we could just turn a knob and we're increasing the size or decreasing the size that oil is flowing through and we're changing how much force the shocks making let's say somebody's looking online they want to oilers because it looks sweet what should they look for to be like oh this is legit or oh this is just aesthetic someone's buying a coil over and online in photos they look very similar and some look really cool and colorful and some they get the job done of lowering the car but always realize that the shock part of it is so important and you got to make sure that the product you're buying is actually gonna make the car handle better not just lower it aesthetically so just ask questions of the manufacturer okay what kind of piston to use is a D shape is a small orifice large orifice and if the manufacturer is kind of clueless about what you're asking and that's probably a good indication that they probably didn't put the Rd and time into developing that shock maybe it's just a shock that aesthetically looks cool and might lower your car and do just that it makes sense so if you're thinking about modifying the suspension on your car if you want to lower your car or just want it to be more responsive you got to choose some good coil overs because you got to have the adjustability and remember you got to have the firmness if you're gonna drop the car so you're not blowing through that suspension stroke so you don't just want to cut the springs on your OEM no that would be a bad idea Bart Nolan subscribe to donut this little button out here is a subscribe button let's say I want to get my hands on some of these sweet sweet coil overs where would I go feel suspension calm and there's links and descriptions of all of our different products twitter and instagram at donut media follow me at bids Bardot follow OD OD drift but Fallowfield suspension ad feel suspension don't tell my wife mean Eddie you're about to go hit the slopesKhoi lowers everybody wants them but not everybody knows what's in them or why you need them you know who does no OD Bakshi you know he trips but he also makes quite a view so he's gonna walk us through basically what we have to think about before we even start putting them together tweet so yeah let's go through it a coilover is not just the shock it's the spring and the shock so we have to choose the right spring and then we have to build a shock to suit the car and to suit the spring rate that we chose as well some shocks already have a spring around the shock so it's technically like a shock and spring all in one but a coilover usually allows you to adjust the preload of the spring which changes the ride height that changes the droop it's a tuning factor that you get from a coilover we can make it all accessible as one unit that usually is very helpful on a race car where you're constantly changing things out changing maybe even the spring altogether it's one unit you pull it out you could change the components put it back in this is a coil over from a Nissan 240sx this is a Macpherson style shock that is a coil over with spring preload adjustability meaning that these locking collars could preload this spring more or less this whole coil over system is the upper control arm and the shock this kind of has a pretty big task it's got to be structurally sound to take side loads and not buckle not bend and ask to have a good solid top mount because there's no pro controller what's cool about most coil overs out there is that you can adjust spring preload it does change the ride out of the car but it also adjusts how much suspension droop you have how much compression travel you have and if the coilover kit has this neat feature like this one he could adjust the ride height of the car by simply turning the lower mount in or out so you can make the shock longer or shorter not all coil overs are designed like that a lot of them this lower mount is permanently fixed to the shop body and this is all you can adjust mm-hmm yep if you only allow the customer to adjust ride height by digesting in preload you're kind of confined to of like a small range of adjustment because if you want to lower the car a lot and the only way you could do that is by taking spring preload out what's gonna happen essentially let's just exaggerate this as soon as the car hits the ground touches the ground oh my god this is a stiff shot this is a racing car shock I can't compress this yeah what's gonna happen is the springs gonna come down a lot the shock itself is gonna come down and and travel meaning that this shaft is gonna get dangerously close to the bump stop it's all gonna be compressed just statically as the car sitting on the ground just from the weight of the car yeah because you want it to be low and that's the only way you could make it lows by taking spring preload out now when you hit a bump you don't have much travel left and you have an excessive amount of droop meaning that when you put the car up in the air or if it's over a bump the wheels are gonna droop out a whole bunch and I know that some of our customers want to lower their car a whole bunch and I don't want them to have to sacrifice shop performance so this is why you could adjust right here without changing the spring feeler we've got a helper spring and we call it to me yeah exactly the helper spring is very useful if the mainspring is very stiff because if car hits the bump it's gonna compress the shock and then on the upstroke it's gonna want to oscillate upward and if there's not enough mechanical movement left to go upward it'll top out the shock and it'll probably be violent and lift the wheel off the ground it's a placeholder if I remove this the mainspring would jiggle around it wouldn't locate properly on the spring seats so this helper spring is basically like someone just holding the spring in place you could literally compress this by hand the whole point of this helper spring is to keep the mainspring located in its correct place so this is basically the shack of this coil over yep exactly this is that important piece of the puzzle that controls the damping inside the cartridge you get the shaft that travels in and out of it at the end of the shaft you have a piston as the piston goes through the cartridge the oil on one side of the piston needs to make it to the other side so it flows through these offices and as it flows through those offices we restrict oil flow by putting these spring steel shims on here we basically cover up those offices with these shims and these shims have a spring rate to them so on compression stroke the shock as it goes down it flows through the bigger orifices on the rebound stroke it flows through the smaller ones this stack of shims is for the compression side this side is for the rebound stroke two completely different stacks because we need a completely different mount of force on the compression side and a completely different amount of force on the rebound side so this stack sits inside the tube these will Bend yep to change the speed with which it can compress yeah it's basically these are flexing open and once they flex open fluid could pass through so the top during compression these are the ones that Bend up exactly that is awesome that you picked up on it this is called a compression stack because this is the stack of shims that's responsible for opening up to let fluid pass during the compression stroke on the rebound rebound these guys been exactly through this side channel exactly yep a large piston is your friend because a lot of surface area is easier to create that resistance for you know the shock just to follow through it's easy to create a lot of force so on at we talked if you're dealing with a small piston and you try to create a lot of resistance it just generates a lot of heat we're getting into the shocks compressing it is we're doing a lot of work and we're creating a lot of heat do the fluids adjust to that so the biggest important factor with shock fluid for a shock tuner like our company is the viscosity index of the fluid you could use thinner fluid in a shock it'll make it softer sometimes if you're having trouble getting the right force out of it with stacking shims another trick is to use a different viscosity of fluid to begin with that's really what separates one shock from another how much time a manufacturers spent at the racetrack or on the shock dyno figuring out what configuration of these shims work best with what type of piston for any specific car and specific driving disciplines and styles now that we know what goes into all of these only the mad scientist is going to show us how he tested out all these crazies and shocks it's shocking it's a shock yep this saves us a ton of time because we could strap a shock in here and kind of run it through similar paces that it would see on a vehicle the magic behind the valving is that we custom tailor it to produce a different amount of force at a different speed you can manipulate that shock in so many different ways and one way to double check your work if you actually get did it right is to run it on a shock diner all right let's run it cool so let's run at five different velocity increments it's gonna warm up for 10 seconds just a quick warm-up and then it's gonna go into one inch per second which is a very slow speed this is the kind of speed that is responsible for the car just slowly shifting weight from one side to the other maybe getting on the brake and a little bit of dive also accelerating a little bit of squat now it's getting to the high speed this is when you hit a pothole or rumble strip at the racetrack and it's kind of jolting the shock through a faster shock shaft speed the top is the amount of compression force the force is displayed right here on this axis you have the velocity so we ran it pretty fast it was recording up to 16 inches per second actually for this test we did it quite a few different speeds that really helps because it paints a picture of the shock so this is called like the damping curve and as it goes faster as the shock shaft speed increases if it starts to actually produce a little bit less force with higher shock shaft speed it's not increasing force in a linear fashion it's digressive lee shaped same thing on the compression side it's pretty steep at the very low speed compression that's because we're dealing with a large piston it's got a lot of surface area to crack those shims loose and open them up it's taken a lot of initial force to do that we could make this initial part of the graph mellower by increasing the amount of lead holes or increasing the size of the bleed hole part you're gonna make the shock as soft as it can be so just turn it counterclockwise this clicks and basically it will stop turning and that's when you know it's at full so here's the graph of the shock full soft and it is yeah yeah so it's still not linear but man we took a lot of force out of it the green is the shock at a stiffer setting the blue line is at the softer setting this is a one-way adjustable shock meaning that we only have one knob to adjust and that one knob in our shocks adjusts the compression side and the rebound side as well the shape or the curve is kind of similar between you know being very stiff and very soft the curve of this graph is something that we designed like we could make this particular shock be progressive we don't want that like for this particular application we wanted it to have a slightly digressive curve we wanted the compression to be fairly linear from like mid speed to high speed we want it to have a little kick at the very beginning and progressive means we'd look like that yeah yeah means we would have less force on rebound at slower speeds and more yep yep so I went from 516 to 619 you will definitely notice that as a driver going from one setting to the other we got a lot of wiggle room to make some really cool changes but if you don't know what you're doing when you're putting a shock to you could really make the car handle worse than it did from the factory and that's where the consumer has to be pretty careful about what coilovers they choose because as a coilover tuner you have the ability to manipulate the shock to do various things you just got to understand that you can make it worse or you can make it way better and so we adjusted the damping for the dyno nobody's gonna walk us through what we just did when we were talking about the piston and how it restricts oil flow we could actually I pass the piston there's two little holes there's one right there another on right there and what that is it's a bypass around the piston it's kind of like the gardener knows out your house you know you could open it up so you get like a little stream coming out or if you really want to blast something you open it up full full blast so that's essentially what you're doing it's also pretty crazy to think that this hole is responsible for a hundred pounds of pressure on recoil yes it seems like insignificant size right it's like a three millimeter hole and there's two of them so it's six millimeters of total orifice but there's a ton of fluid that you could run through there and it kind of sit this is about where it sits right yep so you're out it goes through the hole and then you're closed yep and it goes around it so you could keep track of how how much you're opening it or how much you're closing it we made it so there's indents so as you turn there's an indent we also call that a click so when your friends are like hey adjust the clickers or how many clicks soft or hard you are that's what they're referring to third so what that's doing is basically allowing us to instead of going inside the shock and taking a shim out or changing the piston size we could just turn a knob and we're increasing the size or decreasing the size that oil is flowing through and we're changing how much force the shocks making let's say somebody's looking online they want to oilers because it looks sweet what should they look for to be like oh this is legit or oh this is just aesthetic someone's buying a coil over and online in photos they look very similar and some look really cool and colorful and some they get the job done of lowering the car but always realize that the shock part of it is so important and you got to make sure that the product you're buying is actually gonna make the car handle better not just lower it aesthetically so just ask questions of the manufacturer okay what kind of piston to use is a D shape is a small orifice large orifice and if the manufacturer is kind of clueless about what you're asking and that's probably a good indication that they probably didn't put the Rd and time into developing that shock maybe it's just a shock that aesthetically looks cool and might lower your car and do just that it makes sense so if you're thinking about modifying the suspension on your car if you want to lower your car or just want it to be more responsive you got to choose some good coil overs because you got to have the adjustability and remember you got to have the firmness if you're gonna drop the car so you're not blowing through that suspension stroke so you don't just want to cut the springs on your OEM no that would be a bad idea Bart Nolan subscribe to donut this little button out here is a subscribe button let's say I want to get my hands on some of these sweet sweet coil overs where would I go feel suspension calm and there's links and descriptions of all of our different products twitter and instagram at donut media follow me at bids Bardot follow OD OD drift but Fallowfield suspension ad feel suspension don't tell my wife mean Eddie you're about to go hit the slopes