# How Low???



## Chris2298 (Aug 1, 2012)

I'm over 72K, the only issue I've had is an air leak at the turbo around 38K... No charge warranty fix...


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## XtremeRevolution (Jan 19, 2012)

Half an inch. Maybe 3/4 inch, but no more with factory shocks. Any lower, and the higher spring rates will accelerate shock wear and cause the suspension to crash through more frequently.

The lower you go, the more you compromise the designed suspension geometry. Dynamic camber becomes a concern with heavily lowered cars.

At the end of the day, it depends on your definition of "safe." I wouldn't go more than 1" without adjustable shocks that were designed for a higher spring rate.

Sent from AutoGuide.com App


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## Devilz (May 16, 2012)

I am thinking to get Apex lowering springs which will drop the ride to 30 mm all around


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## Poje (Aug 2, 2012)

Devilz said:


> I am thinking to get Apex lowering springs which will drop the ride to 30 mm all around


Like Xtreme said, if you lower some minor problems will surface, but if you use Springs like Eibach, H&R or others, you wont be low enough to have real troubles, since they lower a max of 1.5 inch for the Cruze.

Lower then that and you need to get Coil-overs or Air suspension and other problems will surface...


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## jakkaroo (Feb 12, 2011)

The cruze will go low enough to have the tire on the fender well.Ps im 22k miles of slammed and not one problem


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## XtremeRevolution (Jan 19, 2012)

Poje said:


> Like Xtreme said, if you lower some minor problems will surface, but if you use Springs like Eibach, H&R or others, you wont be low enough to have real troubles, since they lower a max of 1.5 inch for the Cruze.
> 
> Lower then that and you need to get Coil-overs or Air suspension and other problems will surface...


IMO 1.5 inch is even too much. Consider the amount of travel that the suspension has to begin with, and the designed range of that shock. All of these are important factors that most people don't really consider. Having driven ~140k miles on custom suspensions and lowered springs on my 95 Regal, I can honestly say that there's always a compromise. 

For example, I dropped the car what would normally be considered around 2" over stock with lowered springs all around, and the car behaved decently for a lowered car. I went with coilovers and stiffer springs up front with a much more severe drop and I noticed that the car started to understeer more than it did before under hard cornering. That's because I altered the suspension geometry. The best way to describe this is by outlining the fundamental design of a macpherson strut. 










When you lower your car, you increase the angle between the strut and control arm. Here's what the consequence is. 










Stock, your wheel will have negative camber for most of the suspension's travel, allowing you to take hard turns that do not crash through the suspension while maintaining a good tread contact with the road. 

If you lower your car enough, you change that to positive camber due to the angle of the strut. Refer back to the first image, and look at the blue outline of the tires. You go from image one to image two. Now, every time you take a hard turn, instead of having negative camber and maintaining your tread contact with the road, you have positive camber and you are effectively riding on only the edge of the tire. 

This is what I refer to most of the time when I say suspension geometry. The only way to lower your car enough while maintaining the suspension geometry is by using top hats (mounts) that have camber bolts, or welding in new mounts for the control arm that are higher up than they were stock. Of course, this doesn't address the change in tie rod joint angles, which is another wear problem in itself. 

Here's what camber adjustable top hats look like:










Unfortunately, adjusting the camber enough to compensate for the change in strut angle will also change your static camber and cause you to have a "slanted" wheel, which will wear unevenly and cause other problems during street use. 

To conclude, if you guys have been paying attention, your best bet for performance with regard to ride height is to go no lower than ~1" below stock, while using slightly stiffer springs that will as closely as possible mimic the amount of suspension travel you would have had stock under identical load conditions. Start going too low, and you'll actually hurt your car's handling ability. 



jakkaroo said:


> The cruze will go low enough to have the tire on the fender well.Ps im 22k miles of slammed and not one problem


With all due respect, 22k miles is not an indicator of reliability or success. Your car looks awesome, I'll give you that, but refer to my point above with regard to dynamic camber to see why I don't recommend it to everyone.


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## jakkaroo (Feb 12, 2011)

XtremeRevolution said:


> I
> 
> With all due respect, 22k miles is not an indicator of reliability or success. Your car looks awesome, I'll give you that, but refer to my point above with regard to dynamic camber to see why I don't recommend it to everyone.


Its getting there though haha.Riding to low is getting alittle.....rough for the ladies,Im planning to do airride soon to avoid any more"damage".But the way the cruze goes down very easy,only the toe gets messed up the chamber stays dead on for some reason,Well atleast my car did.Im pretty sure its due to us having to use our stock tophats and having very littel chamber play anywhere.The chamber bolts get you a whooping 1.5 degrees of chamber which doesnt really do any harm.Xtreme you also failed to note the back has no adjustment of any sorts.TORSION BEAM ftw


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## XtremeRevolution (Jan 19, 2012)

jakkaroo said:


> Its getting there though haha.Riding to low is getting alittle.....rough for the ladies,Im planning to do airride soon to avoid any more"damage".But the way the cruze goes down very easy,only the toe gets messed up the chamber stays dead on for some reason,Well atleast my car did.Im pretty sure its due to us having to use our stock tophats and having very littel chamber play anywhere.The chamber bolts get you a whooping 1.5 degrees of chamber which doesnt really do any harm.Xtreme you also failed to note the back has no adjustment of any sorts.TORSION BEAM ftw


Yeah I'll bet it's a bit rough, lol. 

The camber stays dead on because it's a macpherson strut. I wasn't talking about static camber though; I was talking about dynamic camber. The camber of a wheel always changes as the suspension is compressed upward on a macpherson strut. How does that change when the car is lowered? That's the issue I'm referring to. You can always fix static camber on an alignment rig, but dynamic camber is a function of suspension design. 

The rear torsion beam is a double edged sword. Great for lowering, but I'd honestly rather have IRS for handling.


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## jakkaroo (Feb 12, 2011)

XtremeRevolution said:


> The camber stays dead on because it's a macpherson strut. I wasn't talking about static camber though; I was talking about dynamic camber. The camber of a wheel always changes as the suspension is compressed upward on a macpherson strut. How does that change when the car is lowered? That's the issue I'm referring to. You can always fix static camber on an alignment rig, but dynamic camber is a function of suspension design.


I wont lie,it handles worse ,it understeers like a truck but hey form>function lol


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## babymobilcruze (Aug 17, 2012)

Having owned minitrucks can you turn the rear torsion bars to lower it or is it different I never really looked at the rear suspension too much. I assume if you could would of already been done


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## Poje (Aug 2, 2012)

XtremeRevolution said:


> Yeah I'll bet it's a bit rough, lol.
> 
> The camber stays dead on because it's a macpherson strut. I wasn't talking about static camber though; I was talking about dynamic camber. The camber of a wheel always changes as the suspension is compressed upward on a macpherson strut. How does that change when the car is lowered? That's the issue I'm referring to. You can always fix static camber on an alignment rig, but dynamic camber is a function of suspension design.
> 
> The rear torsion beam is a double edged sword. Great for lowering, but I'd honestly rather have IRS for handling.


All those problems are still minor and you have to understand that every mods you do on a car has positive and negative aspect to it and you decide if the positive is more important to you then the negative.

Ive been Lapping on a race track for a while now and for my needs, the car is way better then stock. My setup isnt good for everyone, infact, the majority of the Earth's population would probably hate the way my car rides, but for ME, its what i need.

Conclusion : In the eye of the beholder.


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## giantsnation (Oct 11, 2012)

This topic and XRs posts made me wonder if any vendors make a light lowering spring (only lowering .5"). I remember on my civic I had Tein H springs and they perfect. .5" in the front and .8" in the rear. It helped handling but I was able to retain factory shocks and I had no winter problems.


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## Poje (Aug 2, 2012)

giantsnation said:


> This topic and XRs posts made me wonder if any vendors make a light lowering spring (only lowering .5"). I remember on my civic I had Tein H springs and they perfect. .5" in the front and .8" in the rear. It helped handling but I was able to retain factory shocks and I had no winter problems.



Yes, some cars have that, but not the Cruze.

The only "light" lowering that could be done on a Cruze is if an LS would install ECO springs or a set of Coil-overs that the highest setting is not that low.


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## Blue Angel (Feb 18, 2011)

jakkaroo said:


> ...the way the cruze goes down very easy,only the toe gets messed up the chamber stays dead on for some reason,Well atleast my car did... ...The chamber bolts get you a whooping 1.5 degrees of chamber which doesnt really do any harm.





XtremeRevolution said:


> The camber stays dead on because it's a macpherson strut. I wasn't talking about static camber though; I was talking about dynamic camber. The camber of a wheel always changes as the suspension is compressed upward on a macpherson strut. How does that change when the car is lowered? That's the issue I'm referring to.


I installed the Eibachs on my car which has otherwise stock suspension, which means the front strut-to-hub angle is exactly the same as it was before since the bolts have no adjustment play. At stock height the front suspension appeared to have no camber at all and the rear had noticeable camber. After lowering with the Eibachs (1-3/8" F, 1" R) the front suspension appears to have as much, maybe even more, camber than the rear suspension does.

This indicates that at stock ride height the Cruze's front strut suspension has a lot of dynamic negative camber (additional camber with compression). Now that it's lowered I don't know if there's any more dynamic negative camber left in the front suspension, but since the static camber is now so far negative I'm not sure it really matters; the front end bites into corners MUCH better than it did before, almost as if a tire upgrade has taken place but still using the LRR GoodYears. Between the added front tire grip and the reduced body roll, the car responds to steering inputs MUCH quicker now and really feels like it wants to dive into corners.

The last car I lowered, a 2001 Saturn SC2, had little-to-no dynamic negative camber. Lowering that car made the front end grip worse, to which I had to respond with intentionally added static negative camber, big sticky tires and a rear sway bar. The factory suspension geometry just wasn't as good as the Cruze, though, and my Eco feels MUCH lighter and more nimble even though my Saturn weighed about 500 lbs less... and I have yet to add a rear sway bar to the Cruze! This car will be very nimble with a little more rear roll stiffness.

Based on my personal experience, dropping the Cruze up to 1-3/8" seems to increase handling. The remaining suspension travel is minimal, however. The front end crashes into the bump stops on larger bumps. Such is the compromise of lowering a car. I think in my case the front end went lower than it was intended to by Eibach; the Cruze got revised struts and springs starting with builds early in 2012. This change lengthened the springs slightly and lowered the location of the spring perch on the strut. My car was built in May 2012 so it got the revised struts/springs. I bet Eibach designed their springs to fit the early strut design, and when put on my car the front end went down an additional 1/4"-3/8" more than if I had the earlier design struts. I'm not sure if Eibach (or any spring company for that matter) has dealt with this issue yet?

Anyway, that's my $.02. Lowering the Cruze seems to improve handling and worsen the ride. I posted a far more detailed review of my Eibach spring install a while back:

http://www.cruzetalk.com/forum/12-w...owering-your-cruze-eibach-springs-review.html


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## Rocky87 (Apr 28, 2013)

To all of you, pics or it didn't happen!


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## Poje (Aug 2, 2012)

Rocky87 said:


> To all of you, pics or it didn't happen!


Just look at my sig and right click on pic to make it bigger.

Im on Pedders Coil-overs with about 2.2 inch of drop.


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## Blue Angel (Feb 18, 2011)

Rocky87 said:


> To all of you, pics or it didn't happen!


Click and scroll down (reading optional):

http://www.cruzetalk.com/forum/12-w...owering-your-cruze-eibach-springs-review.html


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## Rocky87 (Apr 28, 2013)

Poje said:


> Just look at my sig and right click on pic to make it bigger.
> 
> Im on Pedders Coil-overs with about 2.2 inch of drop.


Now that's sexy and I love the painted calipers


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## Devilz (May 16, 2012)

what about apex lowering springs which will drop cruze to 30 mm all around?


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