Let me show yas my Showas (shock thread)

[honda93]

Recently, there has been a flurry of activity regarding shocks now that many of you are blowing them up with aftermarket lowering springs; and in one of my recent posts, I wrote this...

For a while I was literally experimenting with certain things on my OEM LX Coupe rear shocks.

Well, during the disassembly process when I pulled the dust cover off, I noticed that the shock only features about 4" of shock travel with a relatively soft bump stop about the same length at the very top of the shaft rod. What's this mean?

Well, for the people who need to lower the car a crazy tiiiite amount, say 2", you are literally cutting the available travel in half, thus putting the valving stack of the shock piston 1/2 way through its range of travel, and that's at rest! Let's put it this way... Imagine what happens when a pothole or other major bump is encountered! You now only have 2" of shock travel versus 4" and when combined with soft aftermarket springs and comfort biased OEM shocks (yes I mean even the Si shocks or Tien springs) things don't turn out too well... That's why OEM shocks on any car with a typical aftermarket lowering spring basically goes 'kaboom' after a few weeks or months at best.

At least the HFP stuff doesn't "drop" the car too much (upto 1" at most from what I've seen and read), resulting in it lasing a lot longer than other aftermarket components.

Well, I went a step further and disassembled the shock. The Showas are actually quite simple in design and quite durable and well-built as long as you stay within their desired range of travel. All of you lowering the car may now realize that there isn't a whole hell of a lot of shaft travel distance to be had in the first place... Lowering the car 1.5" ~ 2.0" is really cutting into things and makes that damper very prone to being bottomed out or blowing seals and such.

I labeled the shock, but I can explain it better if I had more room to type. Then again, I am not an engineer so my explanations revolve around the layman's regarding comprehension and digestibility of data.

Hope this was helpful.

Anthony "Mario" Crea
NNJR-SCCA







Then for those of you wondering who Showa is, allow me to share...

The McLaren MP 4/4 F1 car from the 1988 season. Last year for turbos in F1 because Senna and Prost won 15 out of 16 races in this car. It was powered by a 1.5L Turbo V6 making an estimated 1200hp and the car utterly decimated the competition that year. What kept them from sweeping the series that year? They took themselves out of a race by colliding with each other, such was the rivalry between these two champions. RIP Senna.









And helping the car through all this mayhem...


SHOWA!
The pic is actually of a model of that same car I have at the house.