Suspension rebuild and upgrades

15 Oct 2017

One of the first things I wanted to do with this car was upgrade the suspension. Basically, the car drove exactly like you’d think a 30 year old 300zx with mostly original suspension would drive. I also wanted to drop the car a bit. However, 300zx’s are really finicky about drops and even small drops can easily push the alignment out of spec. So upgrading the suspension is really an all or nothing proposal.

Some of the steering stuff was covered in another post, but here is the total list of suspension parts installed/replaced on the car over the last couple of months:

• ES steering rack bushings
• new outer tie rods
• ES front sway bar bushings
• rebuilt front LCA (ball joint and ES bushings)
• Z1 adjustable FUCA (street)
• SPL adjustable tension rods
• ES rear sway bar bushings
• TT sway bar (used)
• SPL adjustable toe rods
• SPL adjustable RUCA
• SPL eccentric lockout kit
• Tein Flex Z coilovers

This actually covers a lot, but I intentionally decided to punt on the bushing upgrades for the rear. The plan is to, at some point in the future, drop the rear subframe and replace all subframe, diff, and rear knuckle bushings in one shot, preferably with rubber. But that is a lot of work and the bushings in the rear knuckle and LCA, at least, are in decent enough shape.

I opted to cheap out on the coils a bit. Mostly, the Tein Flex Z’s were getting lots of praise for punching well above their weight for their price. I also want to keep the car somewhat comfortable for now and avoid coilovers with pillowballs. There may be a point in the future where I shell out the big bucks for KW, but it isn’t a priority yet. Also, the Flex Zs are quite nice! On the softer settings they’re a bit bouncy, but feel stock-ish comfort wise. Around 6-8 clicks from full stiff is where they feel really great to me.