ISC Coilover Installation + Features On Mk6 VW Golf GTI – Video Transcript

Video Transcript

What’s Included

All of our coilover kits when applicable will come with our sway bar end links when needed. They’ll all come with the spanner tools, you get a small one and a big one to adjust your collars and your ride height. It will also come with grease for your pillow ball bearing as well as anti seize for the threads. Our coilovers offer mono tube construction design, they will come with 32 way adjustable dampers, they’ll come with these little clickers you just stick right in to the top to adjust. These are upgraded Triple S springs. They’re going to give me a little bit better control on the track, a little bit better ride quality, and they’re going to lighten up the suspension just a little bit as well.

Coilover Settings

From stock, these coilovers are going to give us about a 3 inch adjustable range. On this car, it might be a quarter inch above stock to -.275 below stock. Our coilovers come with 3 different damper options: comfort, street, and track. The comfort and streets have different valving inside the dampers, they’ll come with the same spring rates. The tracks have kind of completely different valving inside, and then those will come with their own separate upgraded springs.

Preload Setup

Once you have your anti seize on and threads, the next step will be to preload your spring. Start with your spring perch loose so your spring has some free play in it. Go ahead and spin that down until your spring no longer has free play. What you want to do is spin the smaller collar down until it is just about touching. And now we can start setting up our preload.

So we’re gonna want about a 5 millimeter preload on our spring which is kind of about the same width on our spanner here. I’m just going to go ahead and grab the shock body so it doesn’t move, and just spin this down. Spin it down so you can fit this right inside, which is about 5 mil, spin that down so it touches, and you can go ahead and lock them together.

Helpful Installation Tips

So now let’s get into some helpful tips and tricks to install this kit on a Mark 6 GTI. So first up, once you have the car in the air with the wheel off, you’re going to want to go ahead and take off the ABS sensor and disconnect the brake line from the bracket. Wiggle that out, get the clip, and that should pop right out of there. Next, we’ll take this bracket off, it will be a 10 millimeter. Just like that, it comes out. In order to spread the knuckle and slide the strut, out of it’s home, we are going to need a M14 triple square and an 18 millimeter socket. Just slide right out. To spread this knuckle open, you’re gonna need to get a strut spreader tool. Go ahead and insert that in the back of the knuckle in the slot. Rotate it 90 degrees and remove the 3 strut bolts. To allow proper siding, with the axle out, you’re going to have to undo the ball joint and it’s 3 16 millimeter nuts. After you have everything disconnected, your strut separated, and sway bar disconnected, your lines free and clear, next step is going to be to remove the axle nut. With this all swung out of the way, should be able to just slide this right out with the spreader in there. Might help if you have a friend so this thing stays in place. And out she comes!

Installing Front Coilovers

Once you have your new coilover ready to be put in, first highly recommend putting on same anti seize, for the knuckle so it doesn’t get stuck in there. Clean out any debris out of the knuckle opening, so it has a nice easy fit into the knuckle there. I put the coilover down as low as it can go to make it nice and easy to put in, we can adjust ride height after. Put it up, and drop it in. There is a locator tab in the back that will slide right into the slot there, and you will hear a very definitive clunk. So once this is fully seated, this is kind of where it’s good to have a buddy handy. We’re going to go ahead and lower this a little bit and line up the axle before we connect it up top. Once your axle is fully seated into the hub again, you can go ahead and reconnect your tie rod and the axle bolt back in. Your axle isn’t fully seated before you do this. Make sure the splines are lined up and you can slowly tighten that. And that should be it!

Next step will be to reconnect the three ball joint bolts at the bottom. Alright, so once the studs are back in here, go ahead and put your impact on a low setting if you can, and bolt these on. Also do your 18 millimeter tie rod on the bottom as well. One of the final steps is going to be matching the other side that we’ve already done, height wise.

On the other side we have about an inch and 7/8ths of threads showing so let’s take a measurement real quick, a little over an inch and a half there. What we can do is raise this up, and we can raise the coilover out of the bottom mount with the wrench, or you can usually do it by hand as well. Take another measurement, right on the money, an inch and 7/8ths. Go ahead and grab your small spanner and go ahead and snug that down, should be all set. To finish it off, go ahead and bolt in the new sway bar end link.

Removing Existing Rear Coilovers

Alright, now it is time to do the rear. As you can see, we have the separate spring and shock combination on this car. So first step we want to do, is take out this lower bolt that holds the spring bucket through the car and remove the rear spring. It will be 2 18 millimeters. We have the jack supporting the spring bucket, and now with the bolt removed, we can go ahead and lower this down. Now with the spring bucket lowered, you can go ahead and drop this down and take out your old spring. Now with the springs out of the way, go ahead and grab an impact or big wrench, 21 millimeter for the shock bolt. So this particular step isn’t necessarily required. It’s going to be easier to show you guys what’s going on. This gives you a good chance to clean out any dirt or debris that’s in the underliner. I am going to go ahead and remove this underliner to easily access the top bolts. Now that you have your spring out and your shock bolt out, go ahead and undo the top shock mounting hardware, these 2 17 millimeter bolts. After the shock is out, you’re going to need to take off this 16 millimeter bolt. Sometimes you can get lucky with an impact, other times if you have a box wrench and pliers, you’re going to need to hold this part, as it spins independently of the nut. We’re going to go ahead and try it with an impact. Once you have it off, go ahead and install it onto the new shock. It goes right on top, on that spacer. Grab your new 17 millimeter nut, should have a definite stop with the impact.

Installing Rear Coilovers

Alright, now we pretty much do everything in reverse order, a little bit different cause we’re going to have to set some preload and our springs will be adjustable. Go ahead and grab your rear spring, grab your rear perch, make sure you have your isolator on here, and the adjuster will be going on the top on this car. They also come with these 2 rubber pads. This rubber isolator here, the very round one, will go on the bottom of the spring under there. And this one with a slight cone shape, will be fitted right to there. Put it in here, just like that, it should rest on the nub. Now we can go ahead and install our bolt. So with this set to an arbitrary height, you’re going to need to check to see where the car should sit. Have it low enough to where you can reach it down with your hand, and put in the bolt by hand. Okay, now that your spring is in here, with whatever ride height you started off with, make sure there is a little bit of wiggle room in here, and we are going to set preload. How to do this on this car is a little different than the rear or fronts on a lot of other cars, because it is independent of each other. We’re looking for 5-10 millimeters of preload on this spring. The next step, once the spring is in here, with a little bit of wiggle room, go ahead and grab a floor jack, and we can jack the spring bucket up, and take some measurements of preload. So I have my jack under here, the spring is compressed a little bit. I am measuring from the bottom of the spring to the top. This is a 180 millimeter spring. We’re looking for anywhere from 170-175 millimeters overall length with it compressed. Right now, approximately 6.75 inches translates to about 171 millimeters, we’ve got 9 millimeters of preload, which is good! Also, after you set your preload don’t forget to tighten this 4 millimeter set screw in here, just so you have no chance of this spinning and changing while you drive. Next we can put in our shock, it doesn’t matter necessarily where that bottom mount is as we are going to change it. The bottom mount is lower than the mount on the knuckle, so what we’re going to need to do is loosen this collar and spin this up, until it matches this. Go ahead and grab your bolt, snake it behind there, and start threading it in. Last thing to do is going to be to secure this collar here. Spin it all the way down until it touches, grab your spanner tool, and that is it. Now you can go ahead and lower the jack.