ground control enhancement for isolde

I purchased a set of Koni dampers for Isolde during the holiday season when there was a small discount. I have been dreading to tackle the installation. I have done many installation of after-market automotive equipment and sometimes there are surprises awaiting, even with reputable products like Koni.

The most annoying of driving the Westfalia Vanagon camper is the mushy soft ride. This manifests as sways when initiate a direction change, front end bottoming when entering onto driveways, and front end nosediving when braking. For a very long time there were little choices for aftermarket suspension dampers. Bilstein was the only choice for many years. Koni only became available for Vanagon quite recently - at least not available when I first searching for alternative to Bilstein. From all my research Bilstein dampers almost always reported to be too soft for most vehicles. Koni on the other hand, seems to be better choice for those look to improve handling over the factory equipment.

for a vehicle first introduced in 1979 the Vanagon ages remarkably well; here Isolde and I went shopping for ramen bowls at the Japanese/Asian supermarket

it was weekend and the store was packed with shoppers; the store has significantly increased the selection of Japanese products

I have been looking for ramen bowls a long time and I have never once seen them in this store for the 20+ years since they open. To my pleasant surprise they have some in this trip.

here are two with the one to the left cost nearly twice the one to the right

So what make ramen bowls special? For me is a personal observation as someone who routinely make soup noodles. An ideal ramen bowl must have the attributes for the presentation of a hearty serving of ramen soup noodles. One often overlooked attribute is the shape of the bowl. You want a bowl that has a small diameter bottom, but a large diameter top. This shape would contain the right proportion of soup broth and noodles, and have sufficient surface area on the top to present the multitude of toppings. Hence a conical shape bowl is preferred over a globe shape with round bottom. The latter will force you to put in too much broth. A wide mouth would give you enough surface area to lay out the few slices of charsui, thinly sliced scallions, a sheet or two of toasted nori, half of a lightly poached egg, and a few laces of menma 麺麻.

my tentative choice is the dark blue/charcoal one over the light color one to the right

these are just some other ceramic bowls and plates

i decided to buy 4

we have a few spring like dry days and I decide to plunge into the installation of the suspension dampers

i don't understand why Europeans are so obsessed with text-less instructions; this Koni's instruction on how to adjust the rebound damping is totally useless; and yes, Ikea are you listening? but hay, most Americans hate watching foreign films with subtitles

 i couldn't wait to try out the new ramen bowls

bentley service manual depiction of the front and rear dampers

i soak the fasteners with WD40

i spray the nut with WD40 but it turns out the German fasteners are all in excellent shape thanks also to the excellent factory wax-like rustproofing and there was no sign of any corrosion

a 1/2 inch torque wrench gave me plenty of leverage to loosen the bottom bolt and nut

the factory damper feels like a toy compared to the Koni; the Koni is about 35% heavier; the shaft of the original damper has just a small trace of damper fluid so it should still in relative good shape

The factory dampers provide very little damping in both compression and rebound. The Koni, on the other hand, has magnitudes greater damping. Exercising them with bare hands the factory one can easily be compressed and extended with ease. Not with the Koni. I had to exert force with all my might and only over some time does the Koni compress or extend.

The Koni dampers do not come with any mounting hardware - not even the 5 cent nut for the threaded stud on the front dampers. I think it is rather cheap of Koni to skim on this. I reused all the factory hardware. All the rubber parts including the bumpstops for the front suspension are in excellent shape.

note that there is a conical steel washer on this side of the bolt hole of the lower control arm

To install the mounting nut on the top of the front dampers, a hex wrench is needed to prevent the damper shaft from rotating as one tighten up the nut. As there is very little clearance I had to cut down a dispensable hex wrench I found laying around. I think it is actually Imperial that is close enough to the required metric one for the job.

the hardest part of swapping the front dampers is the shaft nut on the top and to make sure there is enough room to feed the damper through the lower control arm and inside the coil spring; extending or compressing the damper with it being in the coil spring also require some patience and muscle

while I have a good size 3 1/2 ton floor jack (blue) to safely support the front suspension by keeping it compressed but it is too big and gets into the way of passing the damper through the lower control arm; my "toy" jack (red) proves to be indispensable again for jobs like this

It is very hard to decide the rebound damping setting of the Koni without any prior experience with them. I decided to set both the front and the rear ones to 1/2 turn from the firmest setting. This means turning the adjusting valve to full clockwise (like tightening a bolt and a nut), and then back out by 1/2 turn. The full adjustment of most Koni dampers are just slightly shy of 2 1/2 turns.

i have triple-redundancy supports

i find the Koni damper has "made in Holland" on the marking interesting - so old school; no one refer to the country as Holland these days; Holland is a region of the Netherlands

the rear dampers is very easy and there are plenty of room for one to swing the wrenches

The entire process of installing all 4 dampers took about 4 hours working at leisurely pace. All went without a hitch. There were no unanticipated surprises such as having to run to a store to pick up a tool, some metric fasteners, or worst having to order and then wait for the delivery of the special part such as the bump stop that had deteriorated beyond serviceability.

I could not wait to go for a test drive immediately. With the Koni being so much firmer than the factory dampers the ride down a studded tire worn pavement (that is most highly traveled roads here in Oregon) is noticeably noisier with a lightly loaded van as the roughness of the pavement transmitted through the much firmer suspension. No more mushy ride quality. As expected the improvements on road handling is significant, in braking, directional change, and change on roadway inclines like enter and exit driveways. Tentatively my chosen of the rebound damping do not seem too far off the mark.

One thing is obvious. Isolde's damper mounts now subject to more stress than ever but I am sure they are up to the task with the Koni's.

For good measure I decided to check the conditions of the 4 engine mounts to see if they have signs of deterioration.

i raise the engine with moderate amount of lift with the floor jack at the cast engine mount bracket

it is not exactly a foolproof check but i was mainly looking for cracks in the rubber or delamination of the bond between the rubber block and the steel plates; none were found