Im not exactly too informed on much when it comes to cars besides your typical slightly above average knowledge and suspension comes off as a new language.  Ive been having the hardest time trying to find a set or even brand of coilovers that are in a reasonable price range.I also have been looking for over a month now and i really dont want to spent money on something i will regret.  Im aware of the repudable names like stance and KTS etc., but my pockets arent that deep. Im looking to spend around $800-$900, yet have not had any luck on my side. 

If anyone could point me in the right direction or possibly give me some advice it would be of great help. I drive a 92' s13 coupe, and plan to use daily and occasionally track it when the oppurtunity presents itself. I also plan to buy other suspension related parts farther down the road. 

thanks,

Krash

P.S. - Sorry if theres a post about this somewhere else, if there is a link to it should be fine. 

Honestly, I wouldn't spend $800 on a set of coilovers - unless it was just for looks.

A lot of people use coilovers because they give a lot of drop & that's not necessarily a priority for a performance driver, or a racer.

Personally, I use Koni dampers for my street car/race car.  If I decide to go with adjustable height, i will use Ground Control coils w/adjusters.

The last time I did suspension work on my car, I wouldn't buy anything that didn't have race credibility.  That costs money & you'll be glad you spent the money up front, over buying sub-standard parts, realizing they're sub-standard, then buying better parts.

Coilover are important, the only time you wouuld not use them is if you could not due to rules for the class you are racing in.  Street performance springs are too low and too soft.  They suck.

Posted By Mike Kojima on 01-26-2011 09:51 PM
Boxed Fox, what in your experiance are good cheap coilovers? All the ones I have tried to dial in for friends have been nearly useless so I don't even mess with them. I would like to figure out which ones are ok so I could reply to these sorts of questions. I like Tein as a lower cost suspension but to many people, this is expensive stuff.

Hmm... That's a tough one.

From my experience, I would say PIC Performance non-adjustables, Progress suspension's coilovers, and Bilstein Sport / HDs + coilover sleeves. I like PIC and Progress because their hardware is sturdy and they have engineers that seem to know what they're doing when it comes to reavalves to spec. The Bilsteins I like because they're so easy to play with. The parts are readily available, and they're so generic dimensionally that you can use stuff from other shocks. I haven't tried it myself but I know a few people who have Bilstein Sports with Ohlins pistons or AL-KO bits inside. That and because they're so easy to take apart, there are a lot of independent tuners (autocrossers, mostly) who service Bilstein shocks.

I'm still partial to non-adjustables, because I haven't really found too many sub-$1200 dampers where the adjusters work well. Even the new designs seem to suffer from "classic giant needle valve controlling a big bypass that shuts all the way at full hard" behavior. Only exception I can think of are the KYB built Tanabe adjustables, but I don't think they're servicable. In most cases I try to get the service center to do most of the tuning internally and just use the adjusters when it rains.

Posted By yo vanilla on 01-27-2011 08:54 AM
There has to be SOME affordable, good options on the market. Keeping in mind of course that 9 of 10 aftermarket parts aren't so good at any rate, I will always have a hard time believing the ONLY way towards improvement is by spending thousands of dollars. Sounds like a budget comparison should be done, keep in mind the performance-minded buyer in this price point can't let perfect get in the way of good enough.

Mike K, I know you like the KW's, do you have experience with other euro brands like Bilstein?

My biggest issue with the $700 ~ $1200 /kit dampers out there are the adjusters and the service.

Good adjusters are expensive to make. Even the big name brand dampers have adjuster issues. Take the ubiquitous Koni Yellows, for example. From an end-user standpoint, I hate their "infinitely adjustable" knob because the adjuster slips over time and you can never get the same setting twice. Internally, with the way they designed their rebound-only adjuster, it causes a ton of consistency issues between damper to damper. And because they had to make a simple design that they can mass produce, there's a lot of cross-talk as you get closer to full hard and full soft. For that much, I'd rather have combined compression and rebound with 6~12 detents.

Not to say that the single, combined adjustment dampers are all perfect either. With a lot of the single adjustable monotubes, they make the thread pitch so fine that a single click of the adjuster doesn't do anything (like all those coilover kits that advertise 30 clicks of adjustment). With some manufacturers, they build them so setting them to full stiff basically closes off the bypass. I can see how it makes sense from a manufacturing standpoint, but it also means that if your dampers are set up properly, you can't use the full stiff setting without having the things generate enormous amounts of low speed damping force, jack the hysteresis all to hell, and overpressurize the seals. Then on the other side of the spectrum you have dampers with 4 clicks where using the lower two cause the damper to stop damping (Bilstein PSS9). All part of the reason that I tend to gravitate towards non-adjustables for budget applications.

Servicability is important too. I only buy coilovers if the manufacturer, or a third party tuner, is able to service the dampers. At the very least, they need to be able to offer rebuilds and revalving for different spring rates. I won't buy coilovers from companies like Cusco, for example, because their idea of an overhaul is to send you a new damper cartridge from a box in one of their warehouses. What Big J mentioned about BC being able to have dampers valved to spec before they ship out is a big plus. There aren't too many companies out there that offer that kind of service for street coilovers, especially not for free.

Being able to service the damper is key, because that's sometimes all it takes to make a cheapo street coilover "good enough" for track use. A lot of the current gen "JDM" coilover kits actually use pretty decent hardware internally. They just happen to come set up wonky with spring rates that aren't condusive to track use. All they need is a different set of springs and a base revalve, and they'll easily match the guys running Koni 8611 based kits (especially since a lot of the 8611 users never seem to get their dampers revalved).