Form Filler's Delight

Yes, this is definitely the anorak section of this website, nerds of the world unite !

On a more serious note, I found the whole idea of changing suspension geometry confusing and with my ageing braincells I decided that writing down what I'd tried would be a good idea. If only to stop me going round and round in circles.

So I decided to get a baseline. Surprisingly the original owner of my car was clearly a like minded geek and he'd actually recorded wheel arch heights from new, complete with tyre size and pressures at the time. Invaluable in this game.

I went for factory data as well, and in the first page set out period information from road tests. As a help for any S2 owners and also to compare S2 with TC, I've included data from both cars. Source was Autocar road tests.

The second image shows the record sheet I used when first setting up the car. Although I didn't think to do it, it would make perfect sense to record this information before you start pulling the car apart !

The idea here is simply to record compressed spring/damper lengths, where the adjustable platforms are, etc, and how this relates to approximate ride heights in terms of wheel arches and bumper heights.

I later moved on to taking chassis measurements but the advantages of these points are that it's so easy to do.

This is a very crude record and it could be far more detailed to include the adjustable damper settings, how many clicks from zero for example.

I'd assume that varies from one to another brand of damper and I just scribbled it in the notes area when I eventually thought about it later.

This was my most exhaustive and useful of the records on the car, but of course it's only useful if you are attempting to set the alignments yourself. If you've got a friendly garage with suitable equipment then it's largely irrelevant because once set up it should stay aligned for years.

But, if you insist on hard work and head scratching, then this is what I used to record the settings for the traditional string alignment method.

I've also used it to include pretty much every ride height measurement I've seen mentioned on the Yahoo group over the years, so in one sense this form supercedes the previous one.

If you want any of these just click on the link which will load a full size jpg file, then save the image. They should all print out to A4 size. The first is readable but not great quality due to the source, but the other two are decent enough.