Rear coilovers on supers

[aircool]

Does anybody know how the Remmele uni-ball kit gets around this problem? I believe that eliminates the torsion bars and puts the full weight of the car on the coil overs.

The German TUV certificate is very strict though so I cant imagine there being any chance of a failure just through a bolt shearing! anybody own this kit or seen one close up?

[Wally]

No, but 'we' (as in: not me, haha) found out that H&R has a claim on their site somewhere saying they did the research and found out the mounting points were strong enough!
HR is quite a respectable company...

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Wally

No, but 'we' (as in: not me, haha) found out that H&R has a claim on their site somewhere saying they did the research and found out the mounting points were strong enough!
HR is quite a respectable company...

H&R supplied the springs from the (Bilstein) cup suspension used in the Porsche 944 cups, which is how they ended up creating a tüv-approved coil-over set for the rear. They do still offer a complete coil-over set for the 944 with a tüv certificate stating that it is to be used without the torsion-bars.
http://www.h-r.com/bin/RSS-37-827.pdf

For the beetle however they only offer a coil-over for the front and non-coilover dampers for the rear, so they keep the torsion-bars in place, see: http://www.h-r.com/bin/29581.pdf

This basically means

• removing the torsion bars and running coil-overs on the rear of a beetle officially isn't legal in Germany
• The 944 aluminium trailing arm and the 12(?)mm bolt for mounting the damper is strong enough to handle the loads it is subjected to
• The upper damper mount on the beetles chassis could be the weak point (at least it hasn't ever been tüv approved to handle the loads from a coil-over)

[Wally]

Thanks for the excellent summery Simon!

It is weird though as the 944 top bolt (12mm) is the same size as the bug's...

Maybe nobody has Tüv'd it because of the high cost involved wrt being a 'low-cost' beetle...