Dmitriy's Rally Struts

A couple months ago, Dmitriy (who has been mentioned elsewhere as one of our indispensable crew members) asked me if I could put together some rally struts for his FWD Impreza that he is building to run in RallyCar's G2 class (alongside/against Sean and me). I thought about it for a few weeks and surveyed the equipment that I had available to me, and decided that I could pull it off.

The first step was obtaining some dampers. I dug through catalogs of a few damper manufacturers, and found that Bilstein was probably going to be our best bet for rally durability, customizability and price (Bilstein was sort of the plan from the beginning, but I figured I should at least do the legwork). I told Sean what our damper requirements were and set him loose on finding something that matches. After several weeks of phone calls and e-mails, we finally found somebody who didn't think we were totally nuts when we asked about custom valved inverted strut inserts. I think that may have been the hardest part of this project, so I'm glad Sean took care of it.

Meanwhile, I took a bunch of parts from Dmitriy to measure and put into CAD so that I could ensure that the new struts would fit. I got something like this:

Left is stock and Right is...not

The dampers won't be coming for another couple of weeks, so I've just been plugging away at making these things. It's been interesting because the strut tubes are near the limit of what my lathe will do, but it does a pretty good job.

Turning...

Tada!

I've also been making spring perches in a HUGE vertical machining center because it removes material much faster than the lathe does and it does it with one press of a button. They still need to be finished up on the lathe though.

The exciting news is that I just finished up the first strut tube today. The next steps are to plate it so the threads have some protection, and then send it off to powdercoat. Of course I'll wait until all of them are done to do that, but that should happen very very soon.


So that's where I'm at now. I'll update as progress is made, but for the most part it's just duplicating parts so it's not terribly exciting. Meanwhile, check out Dmitriy's build over on SpecialStage (I think it exists in a few other places too, but that's where I keep track of it).