Medium Pimpin' - 1995 E300 diesel build

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

Thank you!

I'll be sure to post up what the final final design looks like. I'm the same in that I don't want to permanently modify the control arms, aside from the little bit of drilling and tapping I've done so far for height sensors.

Here's the design I've settled on, and I'll have pics of the actual welded-up versions as soon as I'm happy with them:

Here's the lower bag brackets, which will sit in the control arm pockets front and rear:


And the upper brackets:


This bracket will obviously sit in the upper spring cups. Once installed, I will drill a hole through the side to fit the air lines.

Finally, these are what I'm calling the "sandwich brackets:"


These will sit on the bottoms of the control arms, and attach via a long bolt to the nut inside the lower bag plates. The piece of structural pipe will loosely interface with the existing holes on the underside of the control arm, to help keep the bracket assembly located correctly.

If my maths are correct, and they rarely are, with the brackets the heights listed, I should be able to get good extension in either direction of the stock ride height, which is good, because the real point of putting this car on air is to get the damn thing up my insanely-steep driveway. Laying on its belly is merely a (major) bonus . My plan is to install the brackets as designed, test the height at 90% extension on my driveway, and then trim the brackets down until the car only barely clears.

[zephyrueffer]

Dang, your car looks nice man.
It would be great if you could post up the finished bracket specs and pictures!
I'm thinking about bagging my car and the only thing keeping me from doing so is how to keep the bags in place without permanently weilding the bracket to the control arm.

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

Oh dam, I have been waiting for some updates. looks like your pretty close to getting it all installed. I want to see how your brackets turn out, how is the upper bracket staying seated, I see the bolt going through the lower?

It's at that point where I'm dying for it to be done and there's not that much left to do, but suddenly there's all this other shit going on to distract me. Vacation, pretending like I know what's going on in class, grading papers, reminding students that they do, indeed, have to cite sources, blah blah blah.

As for the rear upper bracket, what I've done on the prototype is stretch the factory spring pad over the mount, which then fits very snugly into the spring cup. In my limited testing, it appears to work fine, and apparently a number of VW air ride brackets are simply friction-fit on the top, and I don't hear too many horror stories about them. I figure there's something like 900 lbs of force keeping the bracket in the cup at any given time, which ought to keep anybody from going anywhere.

The spring cups everywhere else on the car are different, so I'm going to sandwich the spring cups with the bracket and a plate on the other side, like you see on the bottom in the pic above.

[loekaaz]

Aww, you all care about me

Nope, Just curious

I realize this isn't much of an update, but...

meh

[skiierman]

Oh dam, I have been waiting for some updates. looks like your pretty close to getting it all installed. I want to see how your brackets turn out, how is the upper bracket staying seated, I see the bolt going through the lower?

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

Aww, you all care about me

Where have I been for the past while? Well, I had planned for a big update blowout as soon as I have some new pics of the car to show, but I suppose I owe you guys some kind of update.

The reason you haven't heard much from me is in part because my girl and I spent most of the month of September overseas visiting Istanbul and the Lycian coast of Turkey. We shot a little video of our journey if anyone is interested:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xagcj4Evy5M"]Turkey - YouTube[/ame]

As for the car, I've been testing a prototype set of bag brackets and making adjustments here and there. This is what version 1.0 looked like:



Obviously the lower bracket was much too tall, but like I say, it was a prototype. After a handful of iterations, I believe I've got a design I'm happy with. Right now the amount of drop I'm able to achieve is limited by tire-to-fender interference, and I haven't had a chance to massage the fenders just yet.

I realize this isn't much of an update, but rest assured, this project is not forgotten about!

[loekaaz]

no more updates?

[Kinghorn]

one of my favorite builds right now. keep it up!

[lwrde46]

Awesome.

[siopaolover]

I'm loving this build and all the attention that's gone into it! Can't wait to see this on the ground

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

check out Cycle Metrics, off of Thompson road. I'm sure Gary there could help you out. Its a motorcycle shop but he welds too, he's a great guy, worth taking a look.

Thanks for the tip! I'm going to give him a call as soon as I'm done modeling up what I want for brackets.

I spent a couple of days tracking down a rhythmic clicking noise coming from the front left suspension. After having the car in the air eleventy kabillion times, it turned out the noise was just a loose centercap on the stock wheels rattling around

Progress has slowed slightly due to waiting on parts from various vendors. I had to order new lug bolts, since the MAEs are cone seat and the stock Benz wheels are ball seat. The MAEs also want 1/2" shorter lugs. Wednesday the lugs arrived, but it's been raining (welcome to Oregon ), so I waited until today to finally test fit the MAEs. So, without further ado...

4X4 MODE ACTIVATE!

I apologize for the filthy car – like I say, it's been raining.



Pretty happy with the offset - both front and rear are just about perfectly flush with the fenders:



I want to be able to tuck the wheels at least a little bit, so I doubt I'll space the wheels out any further. Obviously I have a LOT of fender rolling in my future.

I also slapped together a terrible photoshop of where I'm thinking for ride height, roughly 3-3.5" below stock:


I also picked up what may well be the coolest valve stem caps ever, made from real live .40 S&W cases:


Pimp-fuckin'-tastic

I'll have more for you all soon!

[skiierman]

Meeeeee toooooooo! I tell you what, let's you and me round up a bunch of gearheads to go over to Portland Speed Industries and yell at them to drop all their fab customers and move me to the front of the line. That, or I need to find another welder who can do better than the birdshit welds I put out with my old Lincoln buzz box

check out Cycle Metrics, off of Thompson road. I'm sure Gary there could help you out. Its a motorcycle shop but he welds too, he's a great guy, worth taking a look.

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

do you have measurements for the brackets you want made? maybe we can work something out.

That is extremely generous of you! I'll take some more precise measurements tomorrow and PM you with what I'm thinking for a design.

Flickr's down for maintenance / changing the UI again, so I have all the images hosted for the moment on my Dropbox. If for some reason they're not showing, let me know and I'll try to fix them.

Got the AccuAir height sensors mounted up today. In the front, I drilled and tapped the control arm, and attached the sensor linkage there:


In the back, however, the suspension is much more complicated, and I couldn't find a spot I liked to attach the sensor linkage. Instead of attaching the linkage to a control arm, I decided to make a bracket that attaches the linkage to the sway bar. The bracket itself is very simple: just an L-bracket, JB-welded and attached with a hose clamp to the sway bar. This put the linkage inboard enough to clear the wheels, and was actually much easier than messing with drilling a control arm:


It looks a little wack with the fresh black spray on it, but whatevs, one good rainstorm and it'll be filthy like everything else under the car

Since I don't have many pretty pictures to show today, I thought we could talk for a minute about suspension design - spring rates specifically. Obviously I don't want to completely trash the handling on the nicest-riding car I've ever owned, so I want to get this right. Supposedly the factory spring rates are about 300 lb/in front and 240 lb/in rear. Since I want ride height to be 2–2.5" lower than stock, I figure a little stiffer on the spring rate can't hurt. The thing is, though, whereas a regular coil spring (I'm ignoring progressive springs for the sake of simplicity here) has the same spring rate throughout its cycle, a little physics suggests that air springs are extremely progressive in how they behave. Put more plainly, as a spring compresses, it gets stiffer, but as an air spring compresses, it not only gets stiffer, but the rate at which it gets stiffer increases geometrically.

I've done a little bit of math with the specs I'm thinking of for the bags, and I'm getting 344 lb/in at ride height for the front, and 259.5 lb/in for the rear. Here's the spreadsheet showing how the effective spring rate changes over the bags' travel, and a chart showing the same:

[bobbyjones]

do you have measurements for the brackets you want made? maybe we can work something out.

[Oh Damn, it's Sam]

Ugh, what a fucking waste of a day. So, with one shop 2+ weeks out on fab work, I called around to some custom shops around town to see if I could get my brackets welded up sooner. The shops shall remain nameless, but let's just say I'm no closer to having built brackets now than I was this morning.

Shop #1 in Vancouver told me over the phone that they fab suspension components all the time, but when I arrived, suddenly they only do body and mechanical work. Oooookay.

Shop #2 expressed interest over the phone, but apparently a '95 E300 isn't fly enough to fit in with the zillion dollar Porsches and Audis they usually work on, and they essentially told me to fuck off.

Shop #3 didn't quite tell me to fuck off, but as soon as I told them that I would be handling the install, and I just needed them to weld up the brackets with material and a design I provided, they quoted me, no joke, $900. Yeah fuckin' right

Shop #4 was nice enough, but basically told me they had no idea how to accomplish what I needed, and they weren't willing to throw me even a ballpark quote. They also were two to three weeks out on fab, which isn't unreasonable, but the whole point of this enterprise was to avoid waiting until August to get this crap installed. Oh well.

So, right now what I need is either a decent fab shop here in Portland or the surrounding environs that actually WANTS SOME MONEY in exchange for a bit of welding, or a friendly local StanceWorks-er who would be willing to weld up some brackets in exchange for money and/or a copious amount of alcohol and/or a whole mess of bomb-ass ribs off my smoker.

Anyone around here have a shop to recommend or interested in doing some welding? Pretty please?