ABS and Shocks/Springs?

[Fred Munro]

Ben;

FWIR your car has an ABS relay with a blade fuse mounted in the top of the
relay. Sorry, I can't tell you where it is, but in the early C4 chassis it
was mounted under the plastic cover on the A-pillar in the driver's
footwell.

Your shocks do indeed control the rate of spring compression and rebound,
and because of this will control the rate of body roll in turns and the rate
of dive during braking. Stiffer shocks can make the roll rate quite slow and
completely change the way the car feels.

Shocks will not affect the squat from taking your rock collection along on
your camping trips.

Springs do "age" - this is usually demonstrated by sag and settling of one
or more corners of the car. Audi springs also seem prone to casting off
chunks of coil (i.e. breaking), especially on rust belt cars. Rust pits in
the spring coil act as stress risers.

Fred Munro
'94 S4


-----Original Message-----
From: quattro-admin at audifans.com [mailto:quattro-admin at audifans.com]On
Behalf Of Benjamin Weste Pearre
Sent: February 27, 2003 7:30 PM
To: quattro at audifans.com
Subject: ABS and Shocks/Springs?


Two questions:

My "Turn Off the ABS" switch is unhappy.  Is there a relay or fuse I
can pull to permanently disable ABS?  I can look this up if I unbury
my manuals, but they're in boxes right now, and it's snowing, and I'm
going skiing tomorrow morning.

My car's suspension is pretty soft - it definitely rolls in turns and
dips when I brake, and when I load up the back with camping gear, it
squats.  I've had people say that replacing the shocks will help with
this, but I don't understand: shocks will affect the _rate_ at which
the car will settle, but how can they have any effect at all on how
_far_ the car will settle?  That should be controlled by the springs,
shouldn't it?  Do springs go bad after 178k miles?  Why do people keep
telling me to upgrade my shocks?

Cheers!
-Ben

--
Ben Pearre          1990 200TQA          http://hebb.mit.edu/~ben