[Msquared]

To refocus, I'm re-quoting the statement to which I originally responded:

Originally Posted by Nummeister

Never Lower with just springs and that’s with any car. It’s going to put stress on your current shocks in the long run and cause your shocks to wear out quicker.

On to new replies:

Originally Posted by JamesNoBrakes

Lowering springs are shorter and have less travel, to avoid bottom-out, they require a higher spring rate. Suspension 101.

I'm not contradicting this. In fact, I basically wrote the same thing. All I said was that lowering the car's ride height with or without increasing the spring rate wears out the dampers faster, assuming proper bump stops are still in place.

Originally Posted by Alpha1BC

All I'm doing is putting an asterisk on the "You still can't wear out a damper with spring rate changes" claim. You can do this in at least two ways:

Rate Decrease: Too much of a decrease means the damper will be doing more work in compression. Less spring force = more compression speed = more damper force = early fatigue of valve shims.

Now we're getting really hypothetical, because I can't imagine a case where someone would intentionally decrease his spring rates. However, I'll bite anyway because this kind of discussion is interesting to me. I think it's mostly not true that "less spring force = more compression speed." When you hit a bump (i.e. high-speed compression damping) the compression speed is determined by the speed of the vehicle and the acuteness of the bump. If the car is oscillating on its suspension (at its damped frequency), the spring frequency goes down as the spring rate is reduced, and the displacement goes up, and I think the average piston speed remains similar. In terms of acceleration-based suspension movement (i.e. low speed damping), the suspension clearly travels further for a given G-force but also takes more time to reach its max displacement; so I think the speed remains similar but the displacement is higher. I'm least sure about this case, though. But in any case, this would have to be a wild change to result in any decrease in damper life, as you said.

Rate Increase: As you stated, increasing rate only will typically allow higher frequency but lower displacement. The problem comes when the fluid/valves can't damp these motions out because they're not moving in enough one direction to build the fluid pressure to generate damping forces. Small imperfections in the road surface and wheel/rotor imbalances can set this off and won't always have enough energy to be perceived as a noise or vibration by the driver, but if left like that long enough it can wear out piston seal prematurely meaning fluid travels around the piston instead of through it. At that point it can turn into a cascading effect through the system as the damping forces continue to drop. This phenomenon happens to an extent even with all OE parts, but increasing spring rate and shifting the natural frequency of the system outside the range where friction and fluid pressure are able to damp it out can make it fail faster.

I can sort of see this, but again like you said it would have a be a truly huge change to really make any difference in lifespan.

[Alpha1BC]

Seems like we're pretty much on the same page. I'm enjoying the conversation as well lol.

Originally Posted by Msquared

Now we're getting really hypothetical, because I can't imagine a case where someone would intentionally decrease his spring rates. However, I'll bite anyway because this kind of discussion is interesting to me. I think it's mostly not true that "less spring force = more compression speed." When you hit a bump (i.e. high-speed compression damping) the compression speed is determined by the speed of the vehicle and the acuteness of the bump. If the car is oscillating on its suspension (at its damped frequency), the spring frequency goes down as the spring rate is reduced, and the displacement goes up, and I think the average piston speed remains similar. In terms of acceleration-based suspension movement (i.e. low speed damping), the suspension clearly travels further for a given G-force but also takes more time to reach its max displacement; so I think the speed remains similar but the displacement is higher. I'm least sure about this case, though. But in any case, this would have to be a wild change to result in any decrease in damper life, as you said.

I should probably clarify a bit more. This one specifically was a result that I've seen when trying to mimic either springs that were built with a lower-than-acceptable spring rate or someone who just bought they cheapest spring they could find from autozone/rockauto and threw it on where the springs have a lower than derisible rate. I agree that no one would lower their spring rate on purpose, especially on one of our cars lol.

The easiest way I've found to visualize this is as follows: picture driving down a brick road. You've got lots of sharp/jagged inputs of displacement at the wheel. Focusing on one individual spike, initially there's some pretty significant deformation of the tire during the initial impact that typically builds a ton of force at the point of contact but doesn't create any significant motion due to the inertia of the system (especially if the suspension was already in rebound travel as the hit the bump). Now, with the force imbalance between the tire force pushing up from the road and the spring force pushing down and instantaneous motion = 0 (meaning no damping force) the corner assembly starts to accelerate in the compression direction. Here's where F=ma comes in; with a lower rate in the spring the delta force between the contact patch and spring stays higher for more time/suspension travel which equates to a sharper acceleration curve and therefore higher velocity. It's not a huge change in velocity, maybe 5%-7% max from data I've seen, but over the life of the damper it's a non-negligible decrease in life. An undamped system would see higher changes in velocity, but since the damper is doing more work the velocity change isn't necessarily huge. A change like that should still be enough for the driver to detect, but if left alone it can shorten life more than 3σ below the nominal life of the damper when looking at the distribution curve.

I can sort of see this, but again like you said it would have a be a truly huge change to really make any difference in lifespan.

Correct. Same kind of thing as above, the driver can usually tell something's wrong if there's going to be a significant impact to damper life from rate being too high, and again really only becomes a significant issue if left unchecked.

Not going to happen with lowering springs alone unless they're complete garbage and very unlikely to happen on a 6th gen Camaro in general, but still technically possible

[JamesNoBrakes]

Originally Posted by Alpha1BC

Seems like we're pretty much on the same page. I'm enjoying the conversation as well lol.


I should probably clarify a bit more. This one specifically was a result that I've seen when trying to mimic either springs that were built with a lower-than-acceptable spring rate or someone who just bought they cheapest spring they could find from autozone/rockauto and threw it on where the springs have a lower than derisible rate. I agree that no one would lower their spring rate on purpose, especially on one of our cars lol.

There is an important point here. Typically, the OEM springs are configured for the specific trim of the vehicle, such as SS 1LE, SS, 1LT, etc. The would all have different spring rates because they have different weights, weight distribution and other differences.

So, ideally, aftermarket springs are not a "one-size-fits all", but are specific to the exact trim. Sometimes aftermarket springs will "seem" to be, but then when you go and compare against the same product for the different trims/models, the part number is the same, so they are just blowing smoke up your a$$. I went through this with my BMW, there were readily available springs, but they were the one-size-fits-all, I had to import specific ones from AC-S that were relatively hard to get, to properly do it for my BMW (which was used in conjunction with a damper upgrade).

This is another compounding factor about why lowering springs can be bad. You can end up under or over sprung due to this.

[Alpha1BC]

Originally Posted by JamesNoBrakes

There is an important point here. Typically, the OEM springs are configured for the specific trim of the vehicle, such as SS 1LE, SS, 1LT, etc. The would all have different spring rates because they have different weights, weight distribution and other differences.

So, ideally, aftermarket springs are not a "one-size-fits all", but are specific to the exact trim. Sometimes aftermarket springs will "seem" to be, but then when you go and compare against the same product for the different trims/models, the part number is the same, so they are just blowing smoke up your a$$. I went through this with my BMW, there were readily available springs, but they were the one-size-fits-all, I had to import specific ones from AC-S that were relatively hard to get, to properly do it for my BMW (which was used in conjunction with a damper upgrade).

This is another compounding factor about why lowering springs can be bad. You can end up under or over sprung due to this.

Yeah, absolutely. Even OE springs can be different enough rates spring-to-spring within normal production variation that they can cause a perceivable impact to ride quality if they're not matched left-to-right. Willing to bet Camaro even does it, but I've seen suppliers make the part tags for springs different colors based on if they're above or below the nominal rate/check load. When cars go together, they then pick springs with teh same color tag to help make sure you're only half the normal distribution range apart instead of the whole range. Won't damage or break anything at that point, just appearance from ride height and ride quality wouldn't be as good. Same kinda thing goes for most aftermarket springs out there. They're not so far away from OE that they'll start breaking stuff unless the spring is complete garbage (at which point I'd assume people would switch away from them before any damage could happen anyways), but ride and/or handling has potential to suffer compared to OE.