I have had my 1997 base Y87 Firebird for a few months and it has the stock shocks at 58K that actually feel pretty good. The car will need new shocks and like many others I have read literally hundreds of posts about Bilsteins, Konis, KYB, etc. That's all great and there are lots of opinions.
Has anyone ever taken the time to measure and publish force/velocity data for the various offerings? I want the new shocks to work well with the stock springs. It would be REAL instesting to be able to compare the various brands against the DeCarbons and then to each other.
I used to have access to a shock Dyno in a previous life and ran lots of shock curves doing ride and handling work for Chrysler. Thanks

 

Overkill, Bilstein and Koni have worked fine with stock springs since 1993.

 

Any DeCarbon you could lay hands on would also be at least 22 years old, so your benchmark would be questionable.

FWIW, I tried new SLP-valved Bilsteins with factory coils on my '95 Formula and was not happy with them. They really didn't feel much different than the high-mileage DeCarbons I pulled off it. With something like a Koni yellow, the adjustments make a very noticeable difference, which makes it easy to fine tune ride quality. I think the Koni STR-T gets pretty decent reviews as well.

 

Thanks for the reply. I was assuming that someone, somewhere would have stroked a set of stock shocks for a baseline. I'm sure some of the other shock suppliers have that data from years ago. Someone else mentioned that comparing the data was overkill - I am sorry that I am curious about the actual data because it's what I used to do for a living.

 

I totally understand the curiosity, I just don't think the info is out there. I've seen shock dyno data for aftermarket stuff before, although I can't find my bookmark now. I doubt anyone bothered with OEM stuff though, since it's often a marketing department driven compromise between price, ride quality, and handling, with the latter usually the least important factor.

 

The problem with the Decarbons is that they had too much compression and not enough rebound and being sealed they couldn't be revalved.