Just curious.

 

I let Koni Lee revalve my shocks, he knew my application and knew what to shoot for (not me!)

-Chris

 

The day I think I know more than the engineers at Koni is the day I'm probably buying the wrong parts.

 

I've had valving done for my specific requests, and when I bought my latest set of dampers I knew what the curve looked like before spending money and liked what I saw so no changes were necessary.

 

Well, I was curious to see how much feedback you guys give to your engineer. I often read how on here that the driver is a huge part of setup, and that ie. you can't just set valving to .65 of critical damping and go. The guy at Koni,etc is not going to know how you drive.

Btw, do they take into account sway-bar info when they revalve shocks? I imagine it'd affect low-speed valving right?

 

I do my own, I build and dyno our stuff, Penskes.
I also do all of the development driving as well, its become my sort of "specialty".
I have learned alot and I have much more to learn.

 

I specified my applications and needs, they(Koni) provided the answers

 

I guess it all depends on how involved you need to be.

I told Koni what I was doing, and what my particular needs are, and they built to suit. They build shocks for a living and they do it all day, while I drive as a hobby, and I buy shocks once in a blue moon. Frankly if they had asked me to actually specify valving, I would have called somebody else.

 

well valving usually cover a range, so most of the time your covered

 

I did some calculations to determine what spring rates I wanted to use. Then I told the guys at TEIN that I was road racing and I wanted those spring rates, and let them pick the appropriate damping level for those rates.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by rota92 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">It's not road racing, but I give Ed at progress what I'd like to try based on what I feel inside the car and he makes the adjustments. So far no problems at all! </TD></TR></TABLE>

Hello... range of rates, not range of adjustments

 

I turn the little ***** on the double-adjustables until it feels right.

Seriously, I talked to Koni and they valved the shocks for the spring rate I specified.

 

So I guess all of this is referring to the 3011 and 2812's?

 

I assumed so.

 

I have been using Advance Design dampers from Ground Control for about 5 years now on my ITR. Last year I upgraded the springs to 850 lbs/in. front and 1100 lbs/in. rear with a Mugen 26 mm rear bar and stock front bar on my ITR, with mostly spherical bearings in suspension now. I asked the damper guy at AD to match some Mugen N1 damper curves I had sent him. It took quite a bit of back and forth with charts and e-mails for different valvings they tried, but they matched the curves up quite well by selecting pistons and shims and my car runs very well on track. It didn't seem like normal procedure for them as what they usually do is to make the damper curve the same as what has run well on a similar car when they re-valve their customer dampers. I wanted to try the Mugen N1 curve match since I know that Realtime and Mike Galati's team had won World Challenge championships for many years with ITR's using those same springs and force/velocity curves on the Mugen dampers.