j_man

Jay Morris, the owner of Ground Control/Advance Design told me so in a phone call back then - that he did the lengths to work best with the FM top hats - the shocks are long so you have enough droop, but there is enough compression travel too. FM were selling a special version of their top hats with spherical bearings matching the AD shaft diameter.

In my car in front the tires touch the wheel wells metal before the AD shock runs out of travel, in the rear the tires touch the wheel well and the the A-arm runs out of motion range while there is still travel in the shock left (this is with the FM mounts as Jay suggested).

y8s

iTrader: (8)

Lame that I never heard about that. Every time I called GC they were elitist and unhelpful.

hustler

iTrader: (6)

they were cool to me.

reddroptop

iTrader: (4)

I have fatcat **** on my car, but nothing he can revalve can compare.

You have to either go way upmarket (penske's, etc) or wait for 949racing's XIDA to come out to compare.

j_man

Are you joking? So all those national competition winning cars on Afco, Advance Design, JRZ, Ohlins, etc. similarly priced kits are so inferior to the FatCats stuff, that one has to go way upmarket to compare? How many national champions on FatCats stuff? Or reading too much mnet hype?

reddroptop

iTrader: (4)

You obviously misread my post. The fatcat stuff is garbage compared to the 2000$ shock setups.

The ETC was for the high class shocks, such as the ones you posted.

emilio700

iTrader: (3)

What do you think the effect fixed perches will have on a Miata suspension compared to floating mounts? How are your AD's set up, floating, inverted?

FM's appear to be based on T2's = twin tube. Not sure though. SRP for the T2 is about $440 each for the base model, not including any tweaks or additional mounting hardware FM may have added. The description mentions spherical bearings used in upper mounts but the stock photo is a stud mount. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

The XIDA's will be a somewhat different animal.

MX_Eva

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Stance Coilovers. They are very nice for the price range, (aka a good 700 cheaper). I wish I knew what the droop was, but the travel is good if you have the new rear top hats (upper mounts) which does seem necessary to get full travel for the miata. I think the stance's are nice due to the shear beefiness to them, monotube and built to take a beating.

teknikscian

iTrader: (3)

what did i miss? i couldnt find any info on XIDAs?

teknikscian

iTrader: (3)

stance shock dyno i found

teknikscian

iTrader: (3)

flyin miata

y8s

iTrader: (8)

here's keith's blog about the shocks. I think this page covers most of the entries.
http://targamiata.com/diary.php?start=300
here's the shocks after a revision:
http://targamiata.com/diary.php?UID=331

And while we're on the subject, FatCat may have something interesting coming out in the next few months. I can't give you more because he asked me not to share.

emilio700

iTrader: (3)

Stance:
front stroke ~104mm
rear stroke ~76mm

Stance doesn't have facilities to dyno any of their product. They have asked me if I wanted to sell their kits a few times over the last year or so. The dyno teknikscian posted was done by the factory in Asia. It's the same dyno they send no matter what application you ask about. I asked Rob, one of the sales guys who so happens to drift a Miata, about this and he said and I quote "..they're basically the same". So I asked him to send me a set to dyno. I'll post the results in a few weeks. Some of the staff at Stance are real car guys so that's a good sign.

Comparing Stance to Tein, Afco, Koni, Bilstein, Koni, Ohlins, Penske et. al. is an apples to oranges comparison though. Every one of these established companies has engineers working directly with top teams in world class motorsports events. Tein actually ships an ocean container to each WRC event, inside is a full shop. The bigger players have been showing up to top level events with semi's holding a full R&D lab for decades.

Stance is a tiny marketing company selling products designed and engineered by someone else. The engineers doing the production design in Asia are not involved in motorsports. There is no long history of involvement with motorsports, just a few sponsored drifters in the last two years that say "they're great". They may be built very well, certainly pretty, they may even have good looking dyno curves but are just not in the same league.

There is a lot more to building a high performance damper than the external apperance. Like Shaikh has observed, once you get a chance to see what's inside different brands of dampers you get a much better picture. Go to SEMA show and you will see row after row of Chinese "racing coilovers" that are gorgeous. ..Right next to their display of control arms, I/C pipes, BOV's, hub rings and anything else you can machine/form out of aluminum. There is a reason dampers like this can be purchased for less than half what the established brands sell them for. Not saying you shouldn't buy them, just advising realistic expectations.

Not hard to find, click the link on the bottom of my posts. XIDA's, like the FM and whatever FCM is working on, still in development. Looks like FM might have production units soonest.

MX_Eva

I understand that the larger companies have more R&D but I also think they tend to forget about the small end of things. Their ability to sell large quantities to the masses results in little care about individual results. Sure if you pay for their top of the line service you may be able to get someone to take care of you, but at stance since they are small company if there is an issue they work to take care of it right away.

In any case, as more people pick up on using stance the more I've heard people enjoying them far more than their previous Tein Flex, Silk Road, or other similarly priced Coilovers. This doesn't speak for coilover systems costing significantly more. However, I don't see that much improvement in the FM coils specifically. It does seem to have a lot of attention paid to travel and stroke, but for those prices I'd expect to see things like remote reservoirs and maybe a reverse monotube design...certainly not a twin tube.

emilio700

iTrader: (3)

Do you mean the ability to solve "small" problems with the product? The ability to design and produce a product with attention to "small" details? Not sure what you mean.

From experience in the design, R&D and marketing divisions of some multi hundred million dollar companies and some tiny companies, trust me there is no advantage to not having the resources to do what needs to be done either way.

soflarick

iTrader: (8)

Emilio how can you tell from the exterior if it's twin or mono tube, for my information? Also, what performance differences are there between the two designs, as well as with a remote reservoir compared to a shock without one? Thanks.

emilio700

iTrader: (3)

"FM's appear to be based on T2's". The stock photo shows no remote. Afco's OTS monotube uses remotes, the twin tube OTS have no remote. Tne there is the retail price that wouldn't fit if they were monotubes. Just a guess really.

Remotes allow a larger oil and nitrogen volume. Everything else being equal this larger nitrogen volume lowers the useful pressure that user can tune with and improves the linearity between adjuster steps in the lower middle pressure ranges. The XIDA will have that adjustable canister pressure but probably only a handful of users will ever use, have the tools for or know how for that tuning capability. As always though, I design the parts I want for my cars and go from there.

A minor issue is that remotes can sometimes make actually reaching the adjuster quite a bit easier. Note the compression clicker on the 8700 series Penske JMan posted. Yuck.

Everything else being equal, a monotube might have more hysteresis in small piston displacements compared to a twin tube. That's what the Tein MSV and Ohlins DFV hardware addresses. In a perfect world, suspensions using monotube dampers without compensatory hardware would have fairly high motion ratios to hide that built in weakness. In practice, unless you are in a full spherical bearing race car or high end sportbike, you probably won't be able to tell the difference.

The flip side is that fundamentally, a monotube can reject a bunch more heat than a twin tube damper. When damper heat is an issue, this makes monotubes the clear choice. In practice, very few Miatas are driven fast enough, long enough with enough shaft excursion for that to be an issue either way.

There are all sorts of theoretical benefits from different design features but one has to really look at the application and decide what's the best configuration, whether it's sexy or not. I choose monotube because the configuration is ideal for my use

y8s

iTrader: (8)

I confess I drive my car primarily on the street, but the monotubes rode so much better than the twin tubes. bilstein better than koni, A-D better than TEIN.

And none of the monotubes had the MSV or HSV or whatever high speed / low amplitude valve.

emilio700

iTrader: (3)

So no direct comparisons then?

The theoretical difference in damping function between the two is precision at tiny shaft movements and hysteresis, not necessarily ride quality. Past any shaft movements large enough to flow oil through the orifices instead of compressing the nitrogen charge, the monotube will absolutely have higher performance potential.

Another concern for a performance damper is that twin tubes only operate when oriented vertically so shaking them around in a high G environment is more likely to generate aeration of the damping fluid.

Anyway, no suprise that $3500 AD's rode better than $1300 Tein's and also not suprising that any Bilstein rode better than any Koni.

teknikscian

iTrader: (3)

lots of good info on this thread, helping be decide where i want to go with my next setup. these KYBs have to go.. *ron burgendy voice* KYBs were a BAAAAAAD choice...