Tuesday, July 31, 2001
First thing I am working on is something I have been meaning to do for a long time. After I installed dropped spindles on the front of the car, I have always thought the stance has had a little too much rake for my taste. So, I lowering the rear to match. At first, I am trying a 1" lowering block.

This should normally be an easy install, but unfortunately the Nova makes it difficult for two reasons. One is that the hole diameter and spacing on the leaf spring perches doesn't quite match the u-bolts supplied with the lowering blocks. The original hole diameter is only 7/16" whereas the new u-bolts are1/2" diameter. I suppose I could have some different u-bolts made for me, but I am going to try drilling out the holes in the perches. The spacing is only slightly off (maybe an 1/8"), so I just gonna try to slot the holes a little.

A bigger difficulty is caused by the location of the pin on the mono-leaf. The spring perches are setup so that the locating pin on the spring is on the underside of the spring pointing towards the ground. This causes a problem because the block needs to be placed on the top side of the spring in order to lower the car. Not only is there no place for the pin to go into on the bottom side of the spring perch on the axle housing, but this also means there is no way of preventing the lowering block from sliding around.

So far, my solution is the following. The polyurethane spring pads (from Energy Suspension) are the same thickness as the pin height on the lowering block. So, I drilled a hole in the center of the pads. The upper pad locates itself via two raised areas that fit into grooves on the underside the axle housings spring perch. I am hoping these grooves will be able to keep both the pad and the lowering block (whose pin is now inserted into a hold in the spring pad) from sliding around. I will try to add a picture of the drilled spring pad and lowering block combo in a future update.

Let me know if you think this isn't a good idea. I have another idea for loacting the block if this doesn't seem safe. I will have to see after I torque down the u-bolts whether the pin of the lowering block causes the axle to teeter-totter on the block. That would not be good.