Okay, I've searched this board and am running into a roadblock. I've got a 1991 Firebird with the soft ride suspension. I've already swapped out the rear end with a Borg Warner with WS6 Springs. No problems there. But I went to put the WS6 Springs on the front, and my car raised up beyond nothing I've ever seen. We checked to see if it was indexed correctly and after searching here, it looked right. Get this, the WS6 Springs are shorter than the soft ride standard firebird springs. But this is way too high for it to be normal. I don't think cutting a half length of the WS6 spring will help this height problem.

Now, the 383 I have has an HSR with aluminum heads and we've replaced the exhaust manifolds with headers. I know that removed some weight in the front, but not enough that the WS6 Springs shouldn't have worked.

Now, are the spindels and A-arms different for WS6 Front ends? I've checked with my local dealer and they said there is a 1LE performance package for the front end, but I didn't know if that's what they meant for WS6 parts? I've already put the 36MM sway bar and the TDS Wonderbar. I've already put the 305 soft ride springs back in the front and will probably leave them, but I wanted to ask this for those who have already done this. I'd love to eventually have the WS6 springs, but if I need to replace other parts in the front, I see no need in doing this since I got the WS6 sway bar and wonder bar.

Thanks,
Kelly

 

hmm, hard to say if that's how high it's supposed to be or not... a picture perhaps?


how did you index them? bottom coil between the two holes in the a-arm, top coil aligned in the rubber indexer correctly?

 

Yes they did. I checked them based on some other posts here.

Anyway, they just got the old springs back on. They're going to put the rotors on tomorrow and lower it. If it's still sitting too high, then there's something else wrong. If the stock springs are still sitting too high, I'll get some pics and post them here.

 

Okay, he disconnected the sway bar and the car STILL sits too high. This is with my soft ride springs.

Now, this car had 200K miles on it. Could the struts hung up? When we sit the car back on the floor, it settles only a few inches. You can bounce it up and down, but it won't bounce down.

I'm just wondering if new struts could fix this problem. Has anyone ever run into this?

 

did you roll the car around after setting it on the ground? if not that is what is causeing the extra height. firstoff try rolling the car arround to allow the tires to reposition. with the suspention at max extention the tires moove in and wen you set it back down they try to move back out.

 

If it is riding really high (as if it were a clown car) I know what happened (cuz I'vedone it). The springs have cocked in the upper spring cup and haven't seated properly. It is easy for them to bind up there and fail to seat properly. I rented a spring compressor that attached to the outside of the spring, but wasn't able to get it seated properly in two attempts. I gave up and took it to a shop. They used a different style of spring compresor that fits on the ID of the spring to compress the spring and get it to seat correctly in the upper spring perch.

Good luck,

Lon

 

That's gotta be what happened. I'm going to bring the car home this weekend and look at it myself. My buddy is an instructor at a tech school. The springs where changed by one of his students, so if he hasn't had experience with this before, that could be what have happened. I'll post back here again soon.