Is the sleeve around the shock too big to fit up in the extended top hat?

 

You sure the noise isn't the sleeves hitting the tophats? Not sure who made your tophats but are they big enough to accommodate the coilover sleeve inside? At your ride height I have a hard time believe that the control arms are hitting.

Edit: Zellers beat me to it.

With that said I would gladly purchase those tophats from you if you can't get them to work. I have some NB hats I could throw in as well.

 

Just by looking at it, I would expect coil bind would happen before the sleeves could hit the top hat? There looks like less than 2" between the spring seat and the sop of the sleeve. Maybe the coils can compress to smaller than that.

If that's the case, I doubt there's any off-the-shelf top hat that can clear coilover sleeves. My eBay sleeves (which granted have a little clearance in diameter) are like 2.3" OD, which is about the same diameter as the chassis hole.

 

@itskv

I use the Two Six top hats with the same MSM shocks on my NB. I have my sleeves (Allstar) cut back enough for the shock bodies to fit up inside the top hats. Never had any 'metal to metal' sounds.

You should check the top of the sleeves (your fronts don't look cut back much at all) for any contact.

Otherwise, I have 7" fronts where you have 6" but 7" rears.

Regarding your comment on "droop", raising the car UP or letting the tire drop DOWN does the same thing. Maybe you are hearing a front spring unseat but I guess it'd need to be a pretty big pothole.

I'm also @ 12-1/4F & 12-1/2R but the collars are at the bottom & fully engaged on the sleeves. NB...

 

Hey Bahurd,

The pictures i posted were beforecut in the fronts. I had cut them down 20mm from the top, tried not to cut too much cause of the inner sleeve that holds the sleeve in place.

How much had you cut them? I can either cut them or move the sleeves down. Can the circlips be reused?

 

If I recall, the two six hats are 3/4" so 20mm should be fine. And you'd be compressing the bump stops anyway so you should be good.

What are your spring rates? Sorry on phone app...

 

Bahurd,

The fronts were initially cut 20mm, today I took off another 5mm. This leaves the sleeves at 4", 100mm. I also did this to the rears.

I have 6" 600lb, 7" 400lb.

Almost all of the noises are gone! I still get some of the contact noises from abrupt bumps/potholes. I'm not purposely slamming my suspension into these bumps, cruising at 30-40mph on some empty roads with imperfections.

So far, I am happy with it now. I may entertain the idea of bump stop spacers/packers to take up some of the travel by having the bump stops activated earlier...

 

How does this look? I only hand tightened the shocks, I didn't want to go macho man and end up destroying my shocks.

 

I was under the impression that MSM shocks were physically longer than the Hard S shocks, but when I went to swap them that doesn't appear to be the case. I'm not sure if I'm just too dumb and didn't understand what I was reading or if this is a common misconception. The Hard S shocks did compress farther, so maybe that's what I was the source of my confusion.

Any way, picture of rear shocks next to each other (Hard S off a 10AE on left, MSM on right). They were physically the same size, length and height. The MSM shocks were tougher to compress but otherwise identical.

​

 

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Fronts are the same too right ? MSM vs Hard S?

 

See here:



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Some of the confusion stems from the earlier, uncorrected version of the front lengths:

 

^ beat me to it!

 

That doesn't sound right. I have a set of Hard S and a set of MSMs and when they've been off the car they both compress the full length of the shaft to the shoulder (end of the chromed part of shaft).

When you compress the MSM fully, is there still a length (about an inch) of chromed shock shaft left? (would be a bit of a worry, on lowered cars that's a good portion of the bump travel available!).

 

Damnnnn, I wish I'd seen that chart before going to all that trouble of tracking down another set and pulling them out. Thanks for posting though, hopefully it saves other people some time/money.

That was my experience. I'd certainly be interested if someone else found another result. My test method of bouncing on them in the driveway was far from scientific but the MSM shock definitely didn't seem to want to go down as far for me.

 

I've got some MSMs sitting in my lounge atm, I'll try it when I'm home and get a pic.

 

Not the best pic - surprisingly hard to keep it fully compressed and take a photo at the same time:


(that's a rear msm bilstein btw)

 

Thanks for doing that. Looks just like what my Hard S did, mine must have gotten hung up somehow (I'll edit my post above). It looks like MSM and Hard S are identical as far as size, length, and compression depth.

 

FWIW.

 

Speaking of lengths, can any of you who have these apart measure from the middle of the eyelet to the top of the snap ring?