I recently bought a 87 firebird with a rebuilt 350. It has had no suspension work and has 150,000 miles. I bottom out on the highway on seams in the road and my car handles more like my 57 chevy rather than a sports coupe. Any advice on suspension mods and where to buy them would be helpful.
Price range: 300-1000

 

Struts and shocks. available just about anywhere. Koni, Billstein, and Monroe are some good manufacturers.

Springs. Several folks make lowering springs for your car. Or, stock replacements are alos availble.

You can do all of them (springs, struts, shocks) for the money you want to spend, and you will find your car drives a whole lot better.

 

Your price range from 300-1000 is pretty wide but if you're willing to go closer to the $1000 figure you could do the whole suspension and make the car handle great. Do the strut/shocks, if those are originals they must be shot. Then I'd do fully poly bushings. The springs would be nice but my car as 109,000 on the original springs and truthfully they're not that bad. After that depending on what's left over you could do bigger sway bars and rear lca's and a panhard bar. If you don't have the money for a new panhard bar you could always just get the poly bushings for the original. There are more things you could get of course but those parts will make the most noticeable difference. Look at Energy Suspension or PST for their kits, they have everything you need.

 

Don't forget a good torque arm, or you'll only have half of a really good suspension.

 

Everyone always forgets the upper strut mounts. Those little bastards are normally shot on these cars and very few people remember them.

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84 Z28 383
Stripped w/Cage back halved w/ladder bars and coil overs and 9 inch
700R-4 3.73
I would have a time by now if I could ever get my car back from the shop!!

 

Lots of good recommendations so far. You might also want to look into subframe connectors and strut tower braces.

A couple of comments - Specifically that Monroe's Sensatrac shocks aren't going to help give you sharp handling. They are far more oriented toward a comfortable (read, soft) ride with intentionally less damping at the vehicle design ride height.

I'd limit the use of poly bushings in the stock rear lca's to one per arm (unless you intend to somehow mod the bushings themselves to minimize the suspension binding that generally accompanies the installation of poly in the rear lca's). Poly is OK for sway bar brackets and endlinks, and panhard rods. It can even be used in front lower control arms although it will probably get kind of squeaky there.

See my reply to john5.7 87Iroc's topic
"for anyone that understands the design of suspension parts??????????/"
for a link to lots more info.

Norm


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1979 Malibu w/some cornering tweaks and a few other interesting things

[This message has been edited by Norm Peterson (edited August 17, 2001).]