Throughout the relatively short time we’ve been fixing up Project Civic and getting it back (and above) the level it once was, the end goal has changed and morphed a few times. Right now, Project Civic resides in that proverbial gray area that so many cars get stuck in: is it a street car or a track car? There’s no one-word answer to this question, and trying to balance the two aspects can be tricky.
Because the car isn’t practical to drive regularly here in California (smog, theft, Officer Jack on your back) the most logical choice seems to be to take the plunge and abandon hopes of keeping the car street friendly. But I’m not ready to do that just yet, because even though my conscience tells me that I shouldn’t drive the Civic on the streets anymore, it’s still really fun to do that sometimes. The part that’s not fun, however, is dealing with the unbelievably stiff suspension, which has plagued my EK for years. In an effort to come up with a solution that will be more civilized, yet retain (or better yet, improve) the handling characteristics of the car, I turned to KW Suspensions.
KW Variant 3 coilovers: These two-way adjustable shocks offer a great balance between perf
KW offers a wide variety of suspension solutions, catering to any car from a mild street build all the way up to Le Mans–spec GT cars. For my purposes, I opted for the Variant 3, a 2-way adjustable twin-tube shock with independent compression and rebound adjustment. This is important because in order to maintain a balance between street-friendly characteristics and high performance, this independent adjustment allows the user to fine-tune to his own driving style (aggressive or soft), while losing minimal performance from the other end of the spectrum. The V3 comes standard with a street-friendly progressive spring, and I opted to stick with that route. The engineers at KW spend countless hours testing and designing their products, so I’m inclined to follow their lead. V3 coilovers don’t include an upper mount, and while a car equipped with a stock suspension can use the factory upper mounts, my Civic wasn’t stock, so I chose to contact TEIN for a set of its pillow-ball upper mounts. This is a good solution for anyone in a similar situation to my own or if you’re just looking to replace the factory upper bushing with a more precise upper mount.
Before starting, I needed to take out the old suspension and disassemble it to reuse a dust shield from the upper mounts. If you install a suspension without some sort of a barrier between the upper mount and the spring, it’s possible for your suspension to bang around and cause all sorts of racket if there isn’t enough pre-load to keep everything in place. As I put the KWs together, I initially set the ride height so that the spring is just a little bit pre-loaded, but not by very much. I’m not sure how much everything will settle once the car is back on its wheels, so this is as good a starting position as any.
TEIN pillow-ball upper mounts are a good solution for anyone needing increased adjustablil
Installing a coilover on a ’96–00 Civic is a straightforward process. With the car up on the lift, it’s just a matter of removing a few bolts, taking out the stock (or whatever old suspension you have in there) shock assembly, and putting the new stuff in place. This can be a one-man job if it absolutely must be, but take my word for it, invite a friend over for the evening. If you want (or need) to do it on your own, be warned that you’ll need to remove a lot more stuff to get the suspension to slack down far enough to allow the shock body to physically clear the components that keep everything in place.
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After allowing the suspension to settle, I measure each corner and record the ride height.
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By using a dial caliper to measure the distance between the spring perch and the bottom of
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The V3s installed and ready to go.
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Yellow springs with purple collars are a KW trademark on all of the company’s coilovers.