Matt's 97 V90: The V9000+

I'm keeping an eye on this, I'm giving serious consideration to getting another 960, haven't quite decided yet wether or not to go for the waggon this time around, the only thing holding me back is the back end I just dont like those tail lights, they really date it. Are you going to be running a welded plastic bumper or a fibreglass copy?. Think we still need to sort out some sort of salution for lowering the rear too.

The 7 springs were missing like 4 coils. Way too stiff. I think the 7 and v90 springs are the same coil diameter and material but the v90 springs are hella preloaded. It took two sets of spring compressors to decompress them when I changed springs. If anything was bottoming out it was my dampers. Bottoming out, however, feels like an abrupt change in spring rate, a jolt, or a hard bounce. The sensation I experienced was excessive cyclic bouncing after small and large bumps, suggesting that the suspension system was not damped well enough, leading me to believe the spring rate increased significantly.

Tomcat, my bumper will be plastic welded. I don't mind the tail lights, and I'll have the wagon spoiler from my 745 on there to help a bit with that. Still working on rear end solutions right now...

Is that a subwoofer I seeing begging to be stolen Matt?

Yeah, but it's a cheap sony. Not worth the effort of breaking the window

Someday I'll get some tintz. <to go with my R bumper>

You'd be surprised what a tweaker will go through to steal something.

Started on the bumper. Pix tomorrow.

Crappy middle-of-the-night cellphone pic of bumper progress. What up two-tone?
(ignore the watermark)

how are you bonding the two pieces together? plastic welding?

Yeah, that's the current plan. Thank goodness I don't have to do that part.

We were standing there yesterday trying to figure out how all the Swedes do this since the bumpers are very different widths. I still don't quite know. Hopefully splitting it like that will work out right though.

Also, for those of you who missed it: I blew up my engine last year.

Here are some never before seen phone pix of the three (5-hour) day engine swap.

Disclaimer: They're phone pix, remember?

In other news, my car will be back in my careful (and slightly destructive) hands on Friday and apparently half of my bumper cover is done being welded.

So these came in the mail last week


However, they were for this: (which happens to be the reason work is so slow on the daily driver... oh yeah, that and getting my degree)



But then:


Oh man, doin' work.


I think that should fit right...


...there!


Sweeeeeet.

(The back tire is on the curb, not flat.) Now for a crap-ton of filler and smoothing. Skirts and wing are currently off for paint too (not pictured). Rear bumper is next but will just be a respray for now.

Also, this is cool so look at it:

Looking at it.

Wilford Brimley said:

Looking at it.

Click to expand...

I can always count on you, man.

<hittin IPD this year?

I see a freq car

Yup, I don't have a garage so I do a lot of my work at his place.

That's cool. I'll have to scoot down there sometime when you are working on ****

Lookin' sweet, well done.

Well, I left you all hanging last time so here we go:


AIRBOGZ?!


Before I start I want to make a few things clear:

1. If you are looking for a professionally made and installed AIRRIDE 0153 kit, look elsewhere.
2. This is turbobricks. I shouldn’t need to tell you that my work isn’t perfect. It was done on a college-student budget.
3. I used my engineering intuition on most of the calculations that should have been done here. I feel that my design is safe enough to be daily driven. If you don’t like it, feel free to tell me why but don’t clutter my thread with it. So we’re all on the same page with this:
WHAT I HAVE DONE IS NOT GUARENTEED TO WORK AND MAY NOT BE SAFE. DUPLICATE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
… now that that’s out of the way. I believe that my car and the modifications I’ve preformed are safe for daily use. Where appropriate I will mention my reasoning. Feel free to ask if you have any questions.
4. Performing similar modifications may result in contagious smiles and laughter. So what are you waiting for?

Okay, here we go…

I’ve been a closed lowrider fan my whole life. However, I value my back. Air was the obvious compromise.
As I was browsing Craigslist one day I found a complete air suspension system for some random car (the owner wasn’t really sure). Since it was a steal of a deal, I took the ferry to Bremer-compton and picked it up.
This was the result:



Most McPherson air bag systems use a ‘strut bag’ that has a telescoping cylinder in the center so there is room for the damper shaft. This system was designed to seal to the damper shaft and body. Obviously these pieces wouldn’t fit my car so they went in the scrap bin and I got started on some new plates.



These got drawn up in SolidWorks in an hour. I had them cut at a waterjet place a few months ago. I have an extra set available if anyone is interested. You’ll need to source your own Firestone 255-1.5c air bags with bead rings instead of top and bottom plates.




The holes were offset to allow the bag to clear the strut tower (which it would have anyway) and to make space for the fill fitting.




Once these were cut, a groove was turned in the large hole top plate to accommodate an o-ring. This allowed the top plate to seal to the damper shaft while still allowing it to spin when the car turns. I don’t have a picture of it so you can just imagine:




The bottom plate was then welded to an extra pair of stock dampers with the spring seats removed and a hole tapped to accommodate the fill fitting. The top plate and bag were installed, and pair of factory spring seats and steering bearings were used along with the factory camber/caster plates.




Voila, front air struts for Volvo V/S90.



These were installed just like standard strut assemblies.






Now, the part everyone is really curious about: the back.

As you all know, lowering springs for S/V90s and similar 960s are kind of hard to get and expensive at that. Since I’m broke I found a different solution: I made my own.

Wait, WHAT! You think you can just MAKE a lowering spring? But it’s fiberglass and unicorn piss and stuff!

Yes, well that may be the case. I decided I could get away with this for several reasons:
1. The spring wouldn’t need to bear the full weight of the car. It just needs to take a portion of the load off the rear air suspension system.
2. It’s a solid piece of fiber glass. It has resin throughout so there is no great risk of splintering or uncovering dry portions. There is also no obvious complex geometry at work in this piece. It’s a brick and as such I made the assumption that I could treat it as a solid structure rather than a composite structure. I did my best to avoid creating imperfections in the surface that would act as stress raisers.
So, let’s move on to the TB procedure for making your own V/S90 lowering spring. You’ll need a belt sander, a respirator and a vice.

Remove the spring from the car (sounds like something a Haynes manual would say).
Okay, so to do this you need to pull most of the rear suspension off the car. I did this 4 times with the front of the car on the ground so it’s possible. Keep the jack handy as you’ll need to use it multiple times. Remove the brakes, trailing arms, sway bar, and the other bar at the back of the hub (the upper control arm is the only one that stays). The spring is still under tension when the suspension is completely extended so you’ll need to lift on the lower control arm with the jack to unbolt the hub from it. Then it’s a simple matter of the 10 bolts that hold the lower rear subframe to the upper rear subframe.





Once the spring is out, clamp it in the vice, throw your respirator on, and very VERY carefully start removing material from the rear spring. This was a guess and check procedure for me.







This amount was good for a moderate static drop:





This was what I ended up having left when the car was finally low enough:





Once the spring is done, reinstall it and see how much tuck you can get:




To lift the rear of the car I had to use my imagination. I was planning on using bags from the beginning but the ‘kit’ came with cylinders. As it happes, the rear of this car has zero good mounting locations for any sort of bag. As I looked at the cylinders more and more I realized they would work perfectly.
Since a portion of the weight of the car would be carried by the weakened fiberglass spring, the single-shear trailing arm mount would be sufficient to supply this ‘helper’ lift. The cylinders would fit here in place of the factory damper.
To damp the rear suspension, I installed flow control valves in the contracting side port of the cylinder. This allowed the cylinder to work as both a damper and a spring. Problems theoretically solved.

The actual installation was a different matter. The factory damper is about 1.5 inches in diameter while the cylinder was over 3 inches so it was a tight fit.

A spare set of oem dampers gave their lives and I began mocking up mounts for the bottoms of the cylinders.






After some trial and error I finally found a design that worked. The clearances were still pretty tight:

Cylinder to LCA

Cylinder to Swaybar






With some work I was able to angle the cylinder such that the damping valve would clear all the control arms but it still was interfering with part of the frame. Taking a cue from CW who cut part of this out in his coil-over mod (albeit much less cutting), I clearance the frame for the damping valve:




The last steps were installing the compressor, valves, lines, tank, and switches. They, of course, went under the floor in the back.



This was the result:

nice! more importantly, how does it drive?