The lowered mk2 front end CLUNK. The FINAL ANSWER.

Ok, so you've lowered your car with Eibachs or Suspension Techniques springs and now you have a nasty clunking noise from your front end when you hit harsh bumps that you just can't seem to locate. Well here is the answer my friends. There is nothing wrong with your car, its behaving exactly as it should. You see, the Eibachs and STs are progressive springs. This means they compress at different rates at different levels of compression. At one end of the spring are a bunch of tightly packed coils, at the other, wider spaced ones. The tightly packed ones are the softies to help make normal driving more comfertable. Now this isn't news to me or most of you either I assume, but what I just learned last night is how progressive springs work exactly. I always assumed that the tightly packed coils would compress a little more then the other ones, but still compress with them. The both of them working together at the same time to provide a comferatable ride. Well that doesn't make any sense if you think about it. The way progressives work is the tightly packed coils, the soft ones, do almost all of the compressing under normal driving. The upper ones don't do jack till you really push the car. The way the upper ones kick in, is when the lower ones have fully compressed to the point that they're touching and essientially become just a solid cylinder, then the upper ones are forced to compress and you get the stiffer rates. What we're hearing is the lower coils touching each other, and passing on the job of compressing to the stiffer coils. This normal and unavoidable with any progressive spring, YOUR CAR IS FINE. You won't hear this noise when you take a turn harshly as the springs are pushed into each other slowly enough that you don't get the sudden engagement, you will only get it when a harsh bump pushes your springs past the extents of the softer coils suddenly. You may not get any noise at all with new springs too. This was the case for me. I'd imagine it just took some time for the springs to break in and after they softened up a bit they started to touch more often.

Anyways, I had this epiphany while reading the technobable column about air springs in the last issue of Sport Compact Car (mmmm air springs, another topic for another thread). They explained how they work there, I don't know why this didn't occur to us before but at least we know now.