KW Update and Refurbishing Service for our S13 Drift Grip Project Car!

We had gotten a set of excellent GKTech suspension parts for our project S13 and had finished welding up, reinforcing, and relocating the lower control arms pick-up points on the subframe with GKTech parts.  It was not time to think about what coilovers we wanted to run on the car.  We had a set of Dai Yoshihara’s KW Motorsports 3-way adjustable coilovers left over from the Team Falken S13 Formula Drift program that had been sitting around for years gathering dust in a bin at the palatial MotoIQ Headquarters

These coil overs are quite historic, they were on the car when it won the 2011 Formula Drift Championship.  At the end of the season, they were relegated as spare parts and have been sitting at our shop ever since. We thought what a better use of them to send them out to KW to be rebuilt and to use them once again on our Project S13!

We took our parts over to KW’s North American Headquarters in Clovis California to get reworked.  While there the guys at KW talked us into upgrading the shocks from the old-style spool valve design to the latest low hysteresis EXR specs. KW has a full race shock service department and they can handle the most challenging rebuilds without needing to send the parts back to Germany.  Our shocks were pretty hammered and they needed extensive work to get them back into shape.

The old shocks were taken apart and inspected.  It was found that the inverted shaft shock body on one of the struts was bent so a new one was fabricated.  The other body and the strut housings were cleaned and polished and the strut housing was given a black oxide coating.  The rear housings were found to be internally worn so they were replaced with updated more wear-resistant hard anodized parts.