Making Predator Shocks Fit The Z

[camaro1976]

its not going to hurt the shocks. I'm trying to explain it and be able to have it make sense but its kind of tough. With the shock being longer yes your ride height should technically be higher, but maybe with the spring and the a-arms you're using you can't tell. Or you adjusted it out with the preload. But imagine with your old setup if you completely bottomed out your suspension where the frame would be. With your new shocks it will bottom out higher. Not that it really matters that much for that part but it still happens. The bad part is when the suspension goes to full droop it could possibly be bottoming out your balljoints which is very bad.

[CFM-Z440]

What I do is remove the shocks, and measure the center to center distance @ the shock mounts, with the a-arms fully extended, and with the a-arms fully compressed. Those are your boundries. That is as far as your ball joints can move without harming them.

Then measure eye to eye on the shock fully extended and fully compressed. It is really hard to get a fully compressed measurment, so What you can do is measure how much the shock can compress, and subtract that from your extended eye to eye measurment. I do not include the bump stop, I measure so if the bump stop were to fall off, it still wont compress beyond your minimum allowable length.

[chinoduca]

Thanks Pulido and CMF for clarifying that up!
I want some new shocks badly and I've been trying to research this shocks a lot, although not much info is available on them for the Z. The predator shocks seem to be nice Fox shocks and are quite cheap to get. I'm still not sure if I should just wait and save a bit longer and get Elkas or go ahead and attempt to fit these to HDUSA +2 a-arms. I would probably go ahead and cut them to be safe and add some triple rate springs setuped for my needs. It would still be around half the price than Elkas with rezzies.

[Pulido221]

Thanks camaro, CFM for the heads up on ball joints wednesday or Thursday I will definetly check it out by completely compressing my front end and liftting it up off ground to see if I can see any weakspots or stress to the joints. I already flew over handlebars topped out in fourth because nut backing out on right a arm I don't want that happening again if a ball joint breaks off plus the word death sounds scary

[StephSte]

Cool idea..Predator on our side in exchange for high tech military...I wish they WOULD come out with a Predator 3....I am a BIG fan of the Predator..

[Peterrides]

oh woops i just posted up the same thing. my bad didnt even see this thread