Lauren's 1985 Kouki Trueno

[Lauren]

Okay, massive thanks to Si, Tom and of course Mark for their help to fit the new inserts at the front.

Getting the struts out was not particularly difficult. We did wonder if it would be stock or not. We found out that the struts did indeed have inserts of the TRD green variety!

These are part number 45811-TA001

Sorry for the hopelessly blurry pic! Better pics to come.


There was me saying the front was underdamped, but I think it was really over damped as the car would skip everywhere. The TRD Greens are just so stiff. They are also short stroke. I'm really coming to the conclusion that nothing TRD works very well on UK roads. I've still got the TRD blue springs which are pretty short.

So, putting in basically OEM replacements which are long stroke of course, so I'm not convinced how clever that is, but really I'm doing 300 miles a week in the car and am about to do a 1000 mile round trip of Europe in a couple of weeks so I was getting fed up with the really choppy ride which tended to make the car jump around on bumpy A roads.



Installation of the insert wasn't anything difficult really. Here we bolted the axle back to the wheel so we could do up the nut holding the insert into the strut:



Of course now we had a nice short TRD spring and a long stroke damper, the top mount was miles away (literally) from the top of the spring, which made it a right PITA to try and put the strut back in. This was hindered more by the RCA's. In the end my friend came up with a solution which was to compress the springs sufficiently enough so we could get the strut back in. It worked but there were a few frustrating moments!

RCA can be clearly seen here:



The top mounts weren't too clever so we cleaned the bearings up:



After this we re-greased it. They weren't amazing but they are a bit better. I didn't want to spend money on new top mounts when I am planning to fit CS2's in the next six months or so.

Unfortunately my front discs and pads are in desperate need of replacing, so will be doing that next weekend. Those Hawk Racing Pads have just eaten the disc away to pretty much dodgy levels in 20,000 kms! So they will be getting changed before our holiday in two weeks time.

There are still a number of other jobs to do, but the car is getting the propshaft centre bearing changed. We've opted to let a local indie do this as we don't have the pullers and presses needed. We'll also get the gearbox rear oil seal changed at the same time and hopefully have a seat mounting bolt helicoiled as well.

How does it ride? Well, it's now perhaps a little underdamped now, but overall the ride is a lot, lot smoother. It still kicks the back end out with seeming impunity, so all is well as I found out on every wet roundabout on the way home. I did also run it at higher speeds on a bumpy road and I do think it rode them a lot better, this time absorbing the bumps rather than skipping over them. It feels like the tyres are in contact with the road more.