Possibly a long shot this, but has anyone had eibachs fitted on their Mk3 at Hendy’s in Winchester?
I’d be interested to know if the car came back with the dreaded twisted bush syndrome, as I’ve read that different garages do things differently. And not really knowing what to look for, I don’t want to spend hours crawling around with a torch when actually, I’ve probably got nothing to worry about.
Cheers,
James.
Hi James
If your worried, then bring the car down to Beauliea at the weekend, come and find myself or arizona sun and we can tell you what to look for and maybe even look for you.
We will be in the black t-shirts and organising parking etc.
otherwise check the measurement between the centre of the wheel and the start of the body panel straight above and it should be around 335 (+/- 10) mm when on flat ground, much more and its probably not right
Ok, thanks for the offer. I’ll see if I can make it down Beauliea. I’d be in the Mk1 as my Mk3 doesn’t arrive until next week. But having someone point out how to examine the bushes and point out what “right” looks like would be very useful.
Well, having taken my car up to WIM this afternoon, I can confirm that Hendys Winchester do not properly understand how to fit the Eibach lowering springs. Basically, my car (which is only 1 week old and covered a total of about 300 miles) was all over the place. It seems there were three main problems with the job Mazda had done in fitting the springs.
1. Twisted bushes. The bushes were very twisted, causing the car to sit very high. Also, Mazda seemed to have done some odd mucking about with the rear suspension causing some of the bushes on the rear axle to become twisted - something Tony at WIM had never seem before.
2. Geometry. This was way out. Either Mazda had not attempted to do it after fitting the springs, or their kit was playing up.
3. Spring seating. One of the springs (rear left) wasn’t properly seated in the cup things on the shocks. It needed to be turned around by about quarter of a turn to sit properly.
I can kind of forgive point 1. As I understand it, this happens because the Mazda instructions are not clear on when/how various bolts should be tightened during the fitting process.
I’m less sure about point 2. Maybe they don’t have the kit. Either way, some measurements were out of the Mazda tolerance bands which strickes me as dangerous. Certainly the car felt very odd when driving it.
Point 3 is possibly the most worrying for me. It just smacks of sloppy workmanship and a total lack of care. Makes me very worried about getting my car serviced.