Hi All,
I got my Cusco Touring A set installed this week, here are some quick results:
1. Cusco Touring A results The car lifted up 1 cm, both front and rear.
The behavior on the road with the Cusco settings close to max hard (19 of 20 at front, 17 of20 at rear) is very similar to Bilstein. I have not tried softer settings yet.
Even with hard setting as above, the tolerance and handling of speed bumps, pot holes and other stuff on the road improved greatly.
Overall, I am happy with the replacement. Will experiment with softer settings later.
2. Cusco Touring A installation instead of BilsteinsThe installation of Cusco after Bilsteins may come with surprises.
Front: Bilsteins do not have rubber bumpers, and Cusco seems to be have a slightly thicker rods than the standard shocks. So if you are replacing Bilsteins, you will need a bumper 20321AA201 ( marked red ).
You may install also inner dust cover (20322sc000, marked green) - I believe it clicks onto strut's body. Please check it has a hole for a rod wide enough - mine set with a snag fit and I do not believe it is right, so you may need to make a hole slightly bigger so the strut's rod moves freely through the dust cover.
I expected to reuse the outer dust cover (also marked green) from Bilsteins (20322AG010) but the service who did the work said it did not fit and they just did not install any outer dust cover! That for me is very, very strange. The top mounts and pads are the same so I cannot imagine any reason why the outer dust cover could not be reused. So if it is true, then you would need an outer dust cover from a standard struts (20322FG000, also marked green). I currently have only inner dust covers which I pushed up to the very top and they sit fit on the rods just below the bumber and provide some cover for the open part of the rod. Not happy with the works that service did not installing the outer dust covers and also not telling me about that either.
You will need to make a hole with 10mm diameter in the top mount caps (marked blue) for adjusters to go out.
- Front Strut Parts - Cusco.JPG (105.49 KiB) Viewed 1928 times
Rear: bolt-on install with old parts could be reused, only one issue - the adjusters on top of the rear strut rods holds the boot trim slightly up. You will need to cut trim if you want to get to adjusters on regular basis. And probably add some plastic tubes on to of them so the adjusters are not affected by the things you may place in the boot.
Post-Mortem and Bilsteins rebuildThe front Bilsteins taken from the car - the rods have some free play in the strut case, you can feel that if you try to move rods laterally. I managed to disassemble the struts - you need to unscrew a nut at the bottom and then screw in the bolt, and you can take the rod out. As you can see, seal is on a good condition and there is grease there. The red stripes inside are bearings, and you can feel that they are not a snug fit and the rod have a play there. You can also see they are not big at all, I expected them to be wider.
I was not able to remove the metal ring which holds the seal, so I am not able to take the bearings out yet.
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Regards, ilib11