Life Work, Part 1

I know this is fairly boring stuff in terms of car work. But I’ll go head and chuck some photos up anyway.

So first up, the plan for the Honda ‘Life’ that we had recently picked up was to leave it alone, and use it for all our day to day and long distance driving.

But why would we do something as smart as leaving our daily driver stock?

So:

This is the standard front suspension setup. I did some research and decently short coil overs for these things cost about 5 times as much as we paid for the car, so I decided to see if I could get anything cheaper to work first.

Standard strut

I had a search on yahoo, and saw the majority of honda’s use the same strut style, where the hub carrier ‘clamps’ onto the strut (I’ve never looked at honda suspension in my life).

After going to upgrage and comparing measurements with a bunch of other honda stuff there, I came to the conclusion that the point on the Life strut that is clamped, has a bigger diameter than all the other honda stuff. Which means other models will have too small a diameter to suit the Life hub carrier.

Thats ok, I guess I can try sort something when it comes to that. So We took a gamble and picked up these old tien struts out of a Honda Oddysey for a whopping 1000yen off yahoo.

You can see they are still a bit long, but the shock luckly had plenty of travel, so chopping a few coils out of the spring worked like a charm. The next challenge was that yes, the Oddysey ran a narrower clamping point than the life…

Nothing a few coffee cans can’t fix.

I used the strut tops from the factory suspension and it all bolted up like a dream.

Onto the rear suspension next..

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