[V8] and yet another stooopid question that I think I know the answer to.....

[Roger Woodbury]

I am getting closer to pulling the trigger on some new shocks.  The Tire
Rack sale on Konis is almost too good to ignore.  I may or may not do both
front and rears right now, but we're still speculating a bit anyway.

Here are some symptoms that I'll run across the list.

1.  More "floaty" ride than I think is normal.
2.  More pronounced sensitivity to the roughness and unevenness of The
Bayside Road from Ellsworth to home, which means the car is more
bouncy-bouncy than I feel is normal and correct.
3.  A feeling of shudder through the wheel when one front wheel or the other
encounters a sharp bump or unevenness in the road.  Smooth roads (yes, we
have a few here), are just that:  smooth and quiet.

What I do not have is any roaring or grinding noise from the front end which
I have had in the past when my struts were gone, which tells me that the
issue that I have is with control and dampening, but not with strut mounts
themselves.

Hence, my plan is to buy the Konis and insert them in to the front housings
from the top, reusing the existing mounts.  It looks so simple a caveman
could do it.

The rears should be equally simple, and it looks like a Sunday afternoon job
sometime late in April to me. 

The only time that I have dealt with Konis was when I attempted to install
them in my 1967 BMW Alpina.  My efforts were without a spring compressor,
and ended in failure with my taking the car to Ed Loveday's race prep shop
down near Cape Cod and he finished the job.  I never really could tell the
difference between the OEM shocks (whatever they were), and the Koni Reds
that got inserted. I autocrossed that car extensively in those days, and it
was always a killer against similar cars. The biggest problem was that there
were few "similar" cars, and most times the Alpina was classed against
Camaros and V8 Mustangs, which were tough competition depending on the
nature of the course.  

Anyway, as far as ride was concerned, there wasn't a lot of difference. It
would have been nice if BMW had been a little more forthcoming about what
actually constituted that 1600 Alpina, but there were only 12 imported, or
so I was told once upon a time by a BMW owner who (I think) had rabies about
BMWs, and the only thing that I know for sure is that the sound of the
Webers and squeal of the tires off the line indicated that the car really
did have about 130 horsepower....

So I think I'll roll the dice again with the Konis and hope that the
steering wheel shake and lose bouncy-bouncy of the front end is curbed
without knocking the caps of my back teeth....

Roger