EG King springs low spring rates

[EG30]

Does anyone know what's the approx springs rates F&R for the EG Kings low springs?

I'm about to get a set of coilovers, possibly Tein Mono Flex ( 10kg/mm, 6 kg/mm rear )front, . Just want to buy something that is not too much harder ( ie 100% harder )than what I got atm. I'm very happy with the ride quality for my daily driver and would prefer something 40-60% stiffer.

[BseriesPLZ]

if you are about to get teins , stick with it. Dont bother with king springs as they are quite possibly worse than stock

[krogoth]

orly? plz enlighten me as to why u are tarnishing kings name?

[krogoth]

as for the thread starter, dont quote me on this, but the lows are about 30% stiffer than standard eg spring rates

but im not sure

[Kiz_EG6]

if you are about to get teins , stick with it. Dont bother with king springs as they are quite possibly worse than stock

Yeah i agree, kings are good if you can't be bothered cutting ur oe ones or if you want to ruin your bump stops bottoming out on speed humps!

[krogoth]

???

ur blaming bottoming out on the kings???

bottoming out occurs wen cheapos get kings and chuck them in with stock shocks, of course ther will be bottoming out, because the shocks arent designed to work at that height

has nothing to do with the spring, kings are a good brand, dont disrepute them unless thers some proof

[Kiz_EG6]

???

ur blaming bottoming out on the kings???

bottoming out occurs wen cheapos get kings and chuck them in with stock shocks, of course ther will be bottoming out, because the shocks arent designed to work at that height

has nothing to do with the spring, kings are a good brand, dont disrepute them unless thers some proof

It all plays a part, i understand that a shock controls the actual damper, but the spring rate assists also and in my experience, kings have a miserable rate, i went from them to whiteline prog rate. They cost bout 20 bux more a pair and made it a different car!!

[krogoth]

yeh but as long as u match the stiffness of the spring to the correct damper, itll be fine

but back on topic, kings will only be slightly less stiff than the mono flex imo

ther will be a difference, but ride comfort also depends on the damper, not just spring stiffness

if uve got the kings on a high quality damper, it will likely feel more comfortable than the mono flex coilovers

[EG30]

sorry I should have made it more clea rin my 1st post.

I have kings springs + koni sports dampers in my car for the past 1.5 years and very happy with the ride and handling.

now that I have installed a B16A engine in my car and intend to track my car on semis hence the intention to upgrade the suspension package further.

[Kiz_EG6]

sorry I should have made it more clea rin my 1st post.

I have kings springs + koni sports dampers in my car for the past 1.5 years and very happy with the ride and handling.

now that I have installed a B16A engine in my car and intend to track my car on semis hence the intention to upgrade the suspension package further.

Koni are excellent shocks, i would not bother going to coilovers if you still intend much street use on ur car.
You will find that if you upgrade your sway bars and buy some well matched progressive rate springs you will be an arm and a leg above where you are at now, also with a bit more bank to play with than if you bought coilovers!!

[krogoth]

^yes, spring rates arent all that matter, its gets more complicated wen u further want to improve handling once uve got the springs and dampers done

IMO, a stiffer spring may not necesarilly mean an improvement in handling

alot of chassis stiffening stuff is very important, sways, struts etc

hopefully som1 else with a bit more experience will come on the thread and provide a bit more input

[string]

Good handling comes from an appropriate front:rear roll stiffness ratio. As long as your camber doesn't get too out of wack, the only real negatives of body roll (aka softer spring rates) are transitional response and probably more importantly driver confidence.

Koni's are an excellent shock at what Koni's do - provide ridiculous rebound damping. You aren't getting the Koni feel without helping it's bump with stiffer springs (i.e. get rid of your progressive weak kings at once).

If the teins are linear springs then they will be a league above kings in stiffness.

[rk 86 wa]

imo you should just stick with koni and replace the kings with eibach pro kit.

im not sure on this, but i do not think that king springs are a recommended spring for koni shocks? you are better off buying springs matched to your shocks and matched to the car. if i remember correctly, when a friend of mine went to get koni yellows fitted at WaSuspensions, the staff recommended eibach pro kit because they have one of the most hard core testing regimes.

also coilovers are a headache, with the only real advantage being height adjustment lol. oh and setting up coilovers is a down right kick in the face. you can however do decent job purely by feel, but having said that, if you are quite serious there are people paying hundreds of dollars to balance, corner weigh etc.

also, im not sure but 10 and 6 spring rates seem pretty high for an eg cause they are pretty light (1013kg (based on a 93 gli hatch off car sales)? atm on my fd1 (iirc 1180kg) im using 8kg/mm front and 6kg/mm rear and they seem pretty hard even on mid range damper.

under the assumption that a 10kg front is kinda high, id just like to add that high spring rates will also not be very kind to unreinforced chassis as you can imagine.

also with the eibach and koni, you shouldnt go below the optimal ride height which can lead to crappy weight transition due to restricted control arm movement and also camber problems due to control arm position.

[JohnL]

Yeah i agree, kings are good if you can't be bothered cutting ur oe ones or if you want to ruin your bump stops bottoming out on speed humps!

Cutting the OE springs will increase the rate of the spring, but it won't stiffen the spring enough to account for the lower ride height. Cutting OE springs is a good way to increase the risk of bottoming out, despite any slight increase in rate.

Properly engineered lowering springs will be a significantly higher rate than the OE springs, which won't guarantee that every aftermarket lowered spring will be stiff enough, but is almost bound to be a better bet than a cut OE spring.

[JohnL]

It all plays a part, i understand that a shock controls the actual damper, but the spring rate assists also and in my experience, kings have a miserable rate, i went from them to whiteline prog rate. They cost bout 20 bux more a pair and made it a different car!!

The 'shock' IS the actual damper. 'Shock absorbers' do the exact opposite of absorbing shocks, they generally transmit shocks to the chassis more effectively than the springs do, unless the springs are very stiff, or the dampers very soft. What dampers do is to 'dampen' spring oscillations so the contact patch doesn't bounce off the road with every bump. However, on rougher roads with overly stiff dampers you can cause the whole car to 'jump' over bumps, rather than the suspension following the bump profile.

They are also very important in controlling the rate of transient weight transfer, which has a huge affect on transient handling characteristics. Bump valving has strong affects on transient weight transfer, speeding it up with an increase in rate. Stiffer rebound also has this affect.

I agree that a higher spring rate will assist in bump resistance, possibly meaning you don't need a damper quite so high in bump stiffness if the spring is stiffer, though typically you will need higher rebound stiffness to control the stiffer spring. The main reason you might need a stiffer bump valving on a damper is to more effectively control the mass of the unsprung weight as it travels upward in bump, i.e. to prevent the mass of the unsprung weight from continuing to rise, but a stiffer spring will add to this bump resistance.

This has to do with the harmonic frequency of the spring as it interacts with the unsprung weight, i.e. the greater the unsprung weight or the softer the spring the more the unsprung weight will continue rising even after the bump has been left behind (due to kinetic energy in the unsprung mass), which excessively lightens the contact patch which has implications for grip. To counteract this we need either a stiffer spring or a stiffer damper bump valving (to 'dampen' the spring oscillation). The damper transmits much of this energy to the mass of the sprung weight (i.e. the chassis) and converts the remainder into heat (which is then radiated from the damper).

If you can lighten the unsprung weight then typically you could lessen both bump and rebound damping because the spring oscillation will behave differently with less unsprung weight. If you increase unsprung weight (typically with heavier wheels / tyres) then ideally you may well have to increase bump and rebound rates, which will result in a rougher ride at least but also less precise control of chassis motion, especially over larger bumps.

The lighter the chassis the more important less unsprung weight / mass becomes. A light car with heavy unsprung mass will require damper rates that are so high that the whole car will tend to get lauched over bumps, but if you soften the damper rate only the contact patch will get 'launched'. Either way you lose contact with the ground, and a good reason not to fit excessively heavy wheels and tyres onto a lighter car.

Progressive rate springs tend to be not so good as linear rate as long as the linear rate spring is near the correct rate for the application and correctly matched to the damper rates (important for progressives as well of course). Racing car engineers tend to avoid progressive springs because they introduce a 'non linearity' into the suspension behaviour and can make the car difficult to drive on the limit, and are also much harder to correctly match with a damper or vice versa. They can be an acceptable compromise for a road car, but rarely a racer. An exception might be rally cars where the spring may have a substantially rising rate near the end of suspension travel that has little affect on handling linearity but assists in preventing heavy bottoming out on hard bumps (but this might be achieved with heavy duty rising rate bump stops).

Your good experience with progressives is likely due to either your dampers more correctly matching the progressive springs than they did the linear springs, or else the linear springs were just too soft compared to the 'soft rate' of the progressives.

[JohnL]

yeh but as long as u match the stiffness of the spring to the correct damper, itll be fine

And I just wrote hundreds of words in my last post! I agree!

[JohnL]

Koni are excellent shocks, i would not bother going to coilovers if you still intend much street use on ur car.
You will find that if you upgrade your sway bars and buy some well matched progressive rate springs you will be an arm and a leg above where you are at now, also with a bit more bank to play with than if you bought coilovers!!

I'll back that up, except I think linear rate springs will be better for any track work. A stiffer front ARB may be OK if you use a very much stiffer rear ARB. You do want the inside rear wheel to lift in heavy cornering as it lessens understeer. By increasing rear roll stiffness vs front roll stiffness you increase the % of total weight transfer that occurs at the rear, but lessen the % at the front, so front weight is more evenly carried on both front tyres and thus more front grip.

[JohnL]

IMO, a stiffer spring may not necesarilly mean an improvement in handling

Of course this statement is impossible to disagree with! I more or less agree with the intent of your statement but it does depend on the spring rate that the replacement spring is replacing. Many cars come with springs that are just too soft for serious driving, and in this case a stiffer spring will work better (correctly matched to dampers etc), but a very much stiffer spring is not necessarily better than an adequately stiff spring, and it will depend on other factors such as the type of road surface etc.

Only if you have high levels of downforce do you need really stiff springs, and this is mostly to keep the aero apendages at correct heights relative to the ground and correct angle to the airflow etc (though preventing the underbelly from scraping the track is nice too).


alot of chassis stiffening stuff is very important, sways, struts etc

Thoroughly agree. However, I wouldn't consider ARBs as chassis stiffeners, they control roll which assists in keeping the contact patches from gaining excessive pos camber with body roll, and finesse the front vs rear roll stiffness to help with the correct distribution of dynamic weight transfer front vs rear.

Keep in mind that only good quality rigid strut bars actually work properly, if they aren't very rigid then they don't work, or at least not well. Many strut bars have an adequately rigid bar, but are let down by flimsy attachment brackets, and as a result are next to useless (even if they might look pretty!).

[JohnL]

Good handling comes from an appropriate front:rear roll stiffness ratio. As long as your camber doesn't get too out of wack, the only real negatives of body roll (aka softer spring rates) are transitional response and probably more importantly driver confidence.

Koni's are an excellent shock at what Koni's do - provide ridiculous rebound damping. You aren't getting the Koni feel without helping it's bump with stiffer springs (i.e. get rid of your progressive weak kings at once).

If the teins are linear springs then they will be a league above kings in stiffness.

String,
Backing you up nearly all the way. But, Konis only "provide ridiculous rebound damping" if you adjust them that way. On the softer end of settings they are fairly soft.

I have to say I really hate excessive body roll, any roll motion causes a loss in percieved responsiveness, and can actually make the car less responsive in slalomesque manouvres. The same goes for pitch motion, if you reduce pitch motion the car will tend to feel much sharper / more responsive to initial acceleration and braking forces, though this is more of a subjective sensation than reality due to how the forces are imparted into your body.

The problem with many (most?) progressives are that they tend to be too soft in the initial rate, and it's the inital rate that is more important for steering response, and thus important for much of the transient characteristics (too soft, too slow to transfer weight).

[JohnL]

imo you should just stick with koni and replace the kings with eibach pro kit.

Sticking with Koni is never bad advice!


also with the eibach and koni, you shouldnt go below the optimal ride height which can lead to crappy weight transition due to restricted control arm movement and also camber problems due to control arm position.

There are other reasons to not lower the chassis excessivly. Excessive lowering can result in the geometric roll centres becoming too low relative to the CG, i.e. you can easily lower the RC more than you lower the CG, and in this case you can end up with more roll than previously even though the CG is lower (at least more initial roll, geometric roll centre location becomes less important and less influential on weight transfer as more weight is transfered toward the outside contact patches). This can result in some loss of response.

To counteract this you need to reposition the lower ball joints so that the lower control arms are set back closer to the original horizontal angles (more or less horizintal). Fitting stiffer ARBs would probably help in some manner, but ARBs don't have quite the same dynamic affects as geometric roll centre locations, so the result may not be as good as repositioning the RC closer to its original height.

[rk 86 wa]

what JohnL said :cool::thumbsup: