Viking Coilover Assembly
 

Has anyone had experience assembling a set of Viking Coilovers? They require quite a bit of spring compression in order to get the top retainer installed. Problem is there isn't a spring compressor that I can find that will work with the tight clearances between the spring and the shock body.

I have friends that run Ridetechs and they aren't having this problem....

Thanks in advance for any help you guys can provide.

I've done Viking on my own car and QA1s on another car. I didn't have to compress the spring at all in either instance. I think you may have a parts mismatch, honestly. Once you get the spring compressed and installed, how much more travel are you going to have before coil bind?

You could try shorter springs. I had the same problem with my varishocks and bought one of these:

https://www.cachassisworks.com/p-147...ompressor.aspx

Don

Have you tried to call Viking? I haven't had this problem assembling the shocks either and they have great customer support.

We spec'd a 10" spring for my Ridetech front shocks instead of the typical 8" spring and I ran into a similar issue. I ended up using the weight of the car during the install to settle the spring down onto the retainer. Basically I lined everything up, set the shock in place and slowly lowered the car down guiding the top of the shock through the hole in the frame.

I'm not sure if this same method will work with your Viking shocks but thought it might help with an idea of a way to accomplish the task.

Agree. Each shock and coilover kit has a set of springs that work properly. Next length up, no work...

Well...

They might work, you just need to get ingenuitive to get them to work. I think it's called "preloading the spring"?

Ha ha Lance. True. Will work with spring compression.

I had the opposite problem: my springs were too short at full adjustment to get the car up high enough. On the Bilsteins which I originally had, the shock body had a longer range of adjustment, but the Ridetechs have a shorter range (less threads on the body).

I spoke with Ron Sutton about it, and he actually recommended that I use a coil spring spacer instead of using a longer spring. I don't remember the exact details, but he suggested that a shorter spring is actually more responsive than a longer spring of the same diameter and rate.

So instead of going with a 10" spring to get the height back up, I stuck with my 8" spring and added a 2" aluminum body spacer.

I know that doesn't directly answer your question, but perhaps a shorter spring, maybe 10" to 8", with a 1" spacer would get you into a better position?

Thanks for the feedback guys. I actually took this as an opportunity to just go ahead and upgrade to the Ridetech coilovers. Assembly was a snap and to me they just look like a better product.