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#1
August 13th 2019, 16:31
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Your car is amazing similar to my '74 (though I'm insanely jealous of your R&P steering). My coil overs are VERY similar to yours. I have 944 housings with a Ground Control coil over kit(I'll try to add a pic from my phone in a bit), running 2.5 inch 120# springs. What are you doing for the rear? I have 26mm 924 upgrade torsion bars on the rear. I found them on the Auto Atlanta site on sale for $100 for the pair, brand new.
My other 1303('73) has 23.5mm 944 torsion bars, with a very similar front set up(but with Raceland coil overs from a VW Caddy...same 120#). I recently ran an autocross with the car (like you, stock 1600DP) and was astonished at how well it handled. It has Topline front and rear sway bars, and felt super neutral. Even in monsoon like rain, it was nearly impossible to break the rear loose. All that car needs is more power. Oh, it has CBPerformnce front and rear disc brakes. Nothing fancy, but perfectly effective. the suspension on that car, on the road, feels sporty but absolutely not punishing. With the '74, my intent is to run stiffer springs and less sway. I already have the 26mm torsions like I said, but I've not gotten stiffer front springs. I plane to run the stock front sway bar with urethane bushings. On the rear, I have a 15mm 944 sway bar with brackets I made myself (for the torsion housings...I used created pieces and 944 pieces for the endlinks). My hypothesis is the light sways with still control lean but give a little more independence at each corner*. The brakes on the '74 are stock 944 rear and a hybrid 944/914 set up on the front. Hybrid in that I'm using 944 spindles, hubs and rotors, with the rotors turned down enough to allow spaced out 914 front calipers to actually bolt to the 944 spindles. To space the calipers, I used the spacers from the REAR 911 M calipers, which are the exact same casting as the 914 fronts (but with a 35mm piston). It all seemed brilliant until I had to source bolts to hold it all together. 914 calipers use 7mm bolts to hold the halves together. Go ahead, see if you can find those online. I had to order them from Germany from a company called Tola Tool. They were the only company I could find with the right length AND hardness (12.9). They were EXPENSIVE, and shipping from Germany to California was nearly the same as the purchase price. At least they're socket head and not that silly Ribe style. Ugh, sorry for the partial hyjack. I started my response with the intent to talking about an idea to deal with the camber issue. First off, I tried Topline's extra eccentric inner control arm bolts. Then, I bought two sets of VW "crash bolts". Still I could only get about 0 degrees, and I was hoping for -2 to -2.5 degrees. Since you have the same strut housings as I do, you have a slotted top hole(incidentally, the Raceland coilovers I have on the other car have slotted top holes too). One day while staring at one strut any thinking about giving up on using 944 spindles, I realized the flange on the top crash bolts was big enough to limit the amount of camber I could get. I found a camber adjusting bolts made for 944s, by Whiteline(the were actually pretty cheap on Amazon). Suddenly, I had plenty of camber adjustment because the shaft of the bolts is 12mm, and, obviously, the camber bolts are made for the 944. So with the items I described and the Topline extra eccentric inner bolts, I'm able to get quite a bit of negative camber. However, I have another idea to gain camber, and it goes along with your idea to have longer control arms. Since you have 944 spindles, I ASSume you have Kerscher ball joints. It has ALWAYS rankled me that Kerscher is the ONLY source for those ball joints. There's a company in Germany called Mike's Boxer Service. He got around the ball joint issue by using early Passat ball joints. You just have to remove the stock ball joint cup and do a small amount of side clearancing on the ball joint, then drill two holes. There's a whole thread about this on STFs but I'm too lazy to look it up and link it right now. Bottom line is, you can gain length for the control arm by changing where the holes are drilled (within reason). That's all I got H2OSB
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johnL (aka H2OSB) '74 1303, Outlaw sedan (with a GL flavor) 
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#2
August 16th 2019, 16:58
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 Nice to see you're so enthousiastic about this!  I'll post an update/my plans for the rear asap, still trying to figure some things out. I just mounted Topline's Camber+ kit and it seems like the camber is fine now, still have to do proper measurements somewhere but that'll take some time since the car is now on jack stands again to get a bunch of parts cleaned and plated. Do you mean these camber adjusting bolts? http://www.whiteline.com.au/product_..._number=KCA412 They seem pretty similar to the H&R Triple C bolts http://www.hrsprings.com/applications/triplec I actually have a pair of those but haven't tried them yet. Do you still have the stock 944 camber/slot at max negative at the top and then added the whiteline camber adjusting bolt at the bottom also at max negative? Quote:
The last picture shows (a part of) the use passat ball-joint. Seems like that setup is similar to the RX-7 ball-joint (see for example https://www.moog-suspension-parts.com/moog-k9427) where the ball-joint is attached to the a-arm with 2 bolts. I always found that a slightly scary way of doing things, but since it is/was used in factory cars it seems to be safe. I'll see if I can make something like this happen. Seems to be less work than fabricating a-arms from scratch. Thanks for the tip! Quote:
And yeah, it's atlasweiß as well Initially I wasn't the biggest fan of that color but it has really grown on me over the years and I really like it now. Will definitely stay this way.And yeah, wheels definitely do kind of make the car and in combination with the color it does indeed resemble some other car  I don't have a sliding roof though Tbh I have to admit I like the Sport Klassik II's that you're using even more than my current Sport Klassik I's, but that would maybe not the nicest thing to do, they would be very similar. Quote:
Did you slot the bottom hole yourself? And do you also have a slotted top hole on the strut as well? Since I was still trying to get the camber in an acceptable range I haven't been messing around with caster yet, apart from using Topline's caster fix bushing (http://toplineparts.com/caster-fix-b...-sway-bar.html), which moves the rotation/mount point of the front rollbar slightly forward. Will measure it when doing the alignment and share the results.
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#3
August 18th 2019, 08:46
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#4
August 18th 2019, 10:25
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The torsion bars will be removed and replaced with coil-overs. Coil-overs are just so much easier to work with and I expect it'll take a bit of trial and error with the spring rates to get to a setup that I'm happy with, which is a lot easier with coil-overs. Also that way I could run a slightly softer setup for the street and quickly switch to other springs if I want to do a track run. Not sure I'll do that since I'm lazy, but you never know :P The brakes will probably be Boxster (986) rear calipers with stock 944 rear discs. These are almost the same as the rears on a Boxster (289x20 for 944 rears vs 292x20 for the Boxster rears). Again not the biggest fan of these discs because they are quiet heavy (6.4kg!) but I'm not sure it'll be easy to find or build something else since the offset is rather large (100mm) and the inside of the discs is used for the handbrake as well. There are still a couple of things to figure out though: Which coil-overs to use? I've been involved with a bunch of motorsport stuff, mainly focussed on suspension and suspension development and I have to admit I've become a bit of a fan of Bilstein. Their products aren't very expensive (apart from their MDS and 5-way EVO dampers) yet are very well designed and deliver very good performance. Apart from that parts are relatively easy to get and revalveing is easy if you want to do it yourself or not so expensive if you want them to do it. So Bilstein it is Then the question remains: Which exact coil-overs to use? Since I'd like to keep using the car on the street I quiet like the Bilstein 944 Cup dampers because they use rubber mounts instead of spherical bearings. They also can be fitted directly to the top mounting point of the 1303 as well as of course the 944's trailing arm bolt. Another reason to pick these is they use Bilstein's 46mm pistons which has more options available than their 36mm pistons, making it easier to customize them to how I'd like them to be. Whilst the Bilstein cup dampers are a known quantity for 944s oddly enough I've been unable to find any information about people trying/using them on IRS beetles. Since the angle of the damper compared to a 944 is slightly different I wasn't sure if the damper would fit, it could be the springs would rub against the trailing arm. So I test fitted a pair and whilst it's definitely a tight fit, it seems like it's possible. There's about 1-2mm room between the spring an the trailing arm. I'll need to massage the body right next to the top mount a bit to create enough clearance for the top hat, but I don't expect that'll be a problem. I'm also considering using 2.25inch springs instead of 60mm springs. That's the way the Bilstein Cup dampers are delivered in the US (see for example the so called 944 escort cup front and rear set on the Lindsey Racing site and it would give a small amount of extra room/clearance which seems like a good idea. The alternative would be to use a spacer like the racer's edge bolt to move the dampders away from the trailing arms, although that one only works with sperical bearings, or use smaller (36mm) dampers in combination with 2inch or 50mm springs. The selection of those is a lot smaller than 2.25inch and 60mm springs though. I'm trying to figure this out this week, make a decision and order the relevant parts. IMG_20190809_191355.jpgIMG_20190809_191404.jpgIMG_20190809_191439.jpg This is with KW 60mm springs btw, that's why they are yellow What kind of system to use to guide the rear trailing arms? Whilst I do quiet like the uniball setup in that it allows for very easy toe in/out adjustment, after reading up on it and talking to some people I think that for my current purposes it's slightly too direct and will pass through a bit too much noise/vibration/harshness. There aren't that many alternatives but it seems like GWD's Performance torsion bar covers are the perfect fit. The torsion bars can be removed because they are no longer required for guiding the spring plates, which saves about 6kg total, yet the guiding of the spring plates is nice an precise without such a direct connection as a uniball setup. I also considered a similar product from Rebel Racing (https://www.rsrproducts.com/product-...ar-bushing-set) but I haven't been able to determine if these would fit on 944 parts. I'll be ordering them this week, hope they'll be delivered soon Apart from that I've been busy disassembling the whole rear suspension to get all the parts blasted and zinc plated. Takes a bit more time than expected, especially finding a company that can do this short-term, almost all of them are closed for the holidays :P Last edited by Simon; August 22nd 2019 at 16:25.
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