looking for a cheap ($200-$300) reliable way to increase ground clearance on a regular car (as opposed to a truck), not a lot, maybe an inch. unibody and not body on frame (so just rasing body and adding bigger tires probably not what i am looking for? i don’t know) i have seen sites for Subaru’s where there are kits going all the way up to thousands of dollars…is this a pipe dream, to do it safely and not ruin the handling etc. without spending a lot? there are a few cars I am thinking of for this one of which is the mazda5 “micro-van” (lets not start on whether it is really a minivan). Obviously you can pick up possibly almost an inch if you get big enough tires but i am looking for somehting where i am not worried about scraping hte wheel well with every speed bump encounter.
on a semi related note how bad for your car in general are bolt on turbo/superchargers? this may be one of those “it depends on so many details that it is pointless” questions…
Cheap, eh? Well, if you have coils all around, you can buy spring rubbers. You jack up the body, and you jam/screw these rubber spacers into the coil to reduce the usable coil travel. If you have leaf springs in the rear, you can unbolt the axle from the leaves, and insert spacers, then rebolt with longer u-bolts. Some folks try to get away with spacing one end of the leaves with shackles, but those things collapse.
Going to airbags would cost a lot more than you want to pay. You also can buy simple lift kits consisting of tricked out a-arms for the front, but they cost more than you want to pay. After you finish dicking around with your ground clearance, go get your alignment redone. Even an inch will mess with tire wear and handling. Good luck on your project.
To put it bluntly there is no cheap way to safely jack up your car. Spring rubbers are cheap, but will create strees points that can cause a coil spring to fail. Axle blocks are cheap, but I have seen them fail. Also the higher the car, the higher the center of gravity and the worse the handling. You best bet is to buy a car with higher ground clearance to start with.
Bolt on turbos? Not going to help make the engine live a long and happy life. When a car maker turbos an engine, it always has lower compression pistons, and usually has (maybe not all but many of the following) heavier cooling system, revised fuel system, including different injectors, and different software, different ignition programming, heavy duty con rods, beefed up wrist pins, oil cooling for the pistons Different exhaust valves (usually sodium filled)
The outside of the engine may look the same, but the inside is way different.
While in general I agree with Rick (and I am not a mechanic in real life), the actual answer to your question is going to depend on what engine you are talking about. Some engines are built with future turbocharging in mind, and some are just plain built much more solidly than their existing utilization requires. This means that it’s safe to turbocharge them.
What you have to understand, though, is that turbocharging or supercharging an engine isn’t what you’d call a static improvement. It’s not like you just select the turbo and get 50 more HP. You can go to howstuffworks.com for info on what exactly forced induction (the generic term for turbo and superchargers) does to a vehicle, but one of the things you need to know if that the amount of pressure you can put into the system is variable, and most bolt-on kits will allow you to adust this pressure to the amount which is right for your particular construction.
Some well known turbo shops have done a lot of testing on certain engines in order to find out what’s safe for the long-term reliability and what isn’t.
Hahn Systems is one of these, and they specialize in Chrysler/Mitsubishi vehicles, including the PT Cruiser. You can add a reasonable amount of horsepower to a PT Cruiser without substantially impacting its long-term reliability.
Your car, however, might not be able to handle this.
First and foremost I want to commend crazyjoe for actually typing out “I am not a mechanic in real life” as opposed to IANAMIRL.
Thanks very much for confirming my suspicions you guys, making modifications to complex machinery, when you are not an expert, on the cheap, is probably not going to work out in the end. I might get something to work (eg rubber spacers), and maybe it would be fine, but the fact is I wouldn’t know if I was in trouble until it was too late. I guess that is sort of obvious now that I write it down, just wishful thinking I guess. Once again thanks for the sage advice, this forum is one of the few places that make you think that maybe there is hope for us yet. Now I am going to go put hydraulics and a blower on my wifes Camry.
One more thing on the subject of doing things you will regret to your car (DTYWRTYC), there are after market roofracks that you install by drilling holes in the roof. A) For joe DIY person would that in general increase chances for leaks, especially after a couple of years in Seattle? (little bit damp from time to time) B) Unless I am mistaken they are just bolted to the sheet metal on your roof, that doesn’t seem very structurally sound, especially for the ones that do not have cross rails. Any thoughts or experiences around this type of rack system?
