YES........PLEASE READ....YOU WILL BE TESTED LATER
C5 Corvette Lowering How To:
If you’re anything like me, you’ve eyeballed your C5 Corvette’s ride height and asked yourself the question, “How do I lower my C5 Corvette?” Believe it or not, lowering your C5 Corvette is a simple as adjusting four bolts, one on each corner of the car, to the ride height your desire, then getting it aligned for your lowered driving pleasure.
Where are these magical bolts? Well, they’re pretty easy to find. Just look under either the car’s front or rear suspension, and look for the long fiberglass spring running width-wise within the car’s suspensions. The springs sort of each look like a single thick leaf spring, turned sideways in the car. Although they are made of fiberglass, the have a protective coating – mine is black. Once you locate the spring(s), look toward the spring tips and you will see a bolt assembly near where they taper to and end. Those are the bolts you adjust to lower you C5 Corvette!
Now that I’ve said that and you know where they are, put down your wrenches because there are a couple of things you need to know before doing this task on your own. While lowering your C5 Corvette is a relatively simple procedure (turning four bolts isn’t that hard, right?), the two biggest things to keep in mind, mechanically speaking, is that the ride height must be done proportionally and equally on all four corners of the car. It is entirely possible to accidentally set the height of all corners of the car to different heights, and the front must match the rear, and the left must match the right. Even if your adjustments are a little off, it can really screw up how the car looks, performs, and will definitely kill your alignment.
Which brings me to your car’s alignment. Any adjustment you make to your C5 Corvette’s ride height WILL mess up the alignment. Period. Turn even one bolt a quarter turn, and the whole works is now out of whack. So, even if you’re able to perfectly set the ride height yourself, your car’s alignment will need to be reconfigured to compensate for its new stance. If you don’t, the car will drive funny and, safety issues aside, you’re in for premature tire wear.
While I’m thinking of it, be very careful around the springs if you attempt to adjust them yourself. Because they are compressed, they contain a lot of kinetic energy and can cause a lot of damage if unsprung or otherwise handled improperly. The spring contains enough energy to crack your skull if your head’s in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Anyway, something else to consider while thinking about lowering your C5 Corvette is that it will now be closer to the ground. This seems like an obvious no-brainer, but there are a lot of things that pass under a normal height car that can get caught on the bottom of a stock height Corvette, and this is even more the case with a lowered Corvette.
Some things that you will need to keep an eye out for while driving a lowered Corvette:
* Road Kill
* Tire Shards
* Anything over about three inches tall will get caught, or at least get clipped by, the front air dam.
Basically, if you see an object on the road and you don’t think it will fit in your mouth, it probably isn’t going to pass freely under your lowered C5 Corvette.
How do I know all this? Well, I took the big plunge of lowering my Corvette about two years ago and have lived the life of a ‘Lowered Corvette Driver’ since then. The car does, indeed, look and perform much better than stock, and its gets a lot of compliments on this great look.
However, there are things, road objects aside, I never knew to give thought to before having this done. I’d probably NOT have it done had I known these little tid-bits beforehand. They are:
* The car lifts at many garages will no longer be able to accommodate your car because it will be too close to the ground to ride the ramps onto the lift. Unless you’re lucky, you will now need to hunt down a garage that can handle lowered cars. If you’re not able to do so, you may need to really learn how to perform your own oil changes, and you may have to remove your own tires and take them, with another vehicle, to have them balanced.
* Your car will now be shorter than most curbs, and you will likely smash the car’s front bumper and air dam, at some point, on these parking lot items. Probably several times. If you, personally, manage to avoid curbs and such, the first person you let drive your car will likely christen it for you.
* Your front tires will likely rub the inner fender liners causing holes to form on the plastic where the tires will rub during turns. This is bad for the liners AND your tires.
* Your car’s front air dam, like mine, may be only 2 3/4 inches above the asphalt. The bottom of the front fenders, just behind the front tires, may only be four inches above the asphalt.
* Unless you pay to have this process reversed, lowering you Corvette is permanent.
* For whatever reason, lowering my car has affected how the car’s electronics ‘see the road’ and also causes the occasional error code to appear within the car’s computer. This will probably happen to your car as well.
* If you thought your C5 Corvette’s stock ride height made it difficult to get a car jack under it, lowering your car makes this process even MORE difficult. Since lowering my car, I now have to drive it onto increasingly tall boards (laid flat on the ground) before I can even get a jack under it. Needing to jack the car up when it has a flat tire (which, of course, reduces the car’s ride height that much more) is an act of near futility. Time to get creative if this happens to you. Good luck.
* When your C5 Corvette breaks down (hey, it’s a Corvette, but it’s only a machine), driving it or winching it onto the back of a flatbed wrecker will require nerves of steel, and a lot of nail biting, as it scrapes its air dam and bumper going up the back of the wrecker truck.
* As you occasionally hit parking curbs and such with your car’s nose, you will probably misalign the front fenders causing them to no longer fit flush against the driver and passenger doors, headlight doors and hood edges.
* The ride will definitely be stiffer than the stock ride.
* Your front suspension will tend to bottom out on large bumps - more than the rear suspension will.
* Lowering the car induces limits on how wide your tires can be. Make sure your current tires will fit before you lower the car - you’ll look fairly silly trying to put wheels and tires back on your car that rub on the fender wells or suspension components.
Trust me folks, except for that last one, all of this has happened to me, and I figured you’d like to know the downsides to having your C5 Corvette lowered.
Costs of having you C5 Corvette lowered
So, if you’re still convinced lowering your Corvette is something you want to do, you’re probably wondering what it will cost to have it done. Because there are no additional parts needed (unless you want the rear lowered even more than the stock bolts will allow, or your mechanic finds something else that needs attention), there aren’t any new parts needed to perform this procedure. There’s the labor, of course, and things line item out close to those listed below. Your mechanic may charge more or less, but use a reputable Corvette mechanic who knows what he or she is doing. Screwing up this procedure will definitely, at a minimum, mess up a set of tires, and you know how expensive those are for these cars.
Anyway, lowering your car will cost:
* About $100 to have the lowering procedure done, or $25 per axle
* About $150 to have the car’s alignment set by a professional Corvette suspension person.
* ‘Extreme’ lowering bolts for the rear, if you go that route, cost about $35 a pair, and there will likely be extra labor to change the stock rear bolts out for these units.
Side note: When you have your lowered Corvette aligned, be sure to have the procedure done with you or the equivalent of your weight in the driver’s seat. A real suspension professional will probably recommend this before you even have a chance to ask for it. This will ensure an even more accurate alignment since, hopefully, your Corvette will not be driving around without you.
So there you have it. My advice is, if you still want to lower your C5 Corvette, have a real Corvette suspension specialist handle this for you, take a conservative approach and lower it incrementally, and drive it around the block at each height to see how you really like it - half inch increments should work great. Once you get to the height you think you’re happy at, you can stop there and have the car aligned. A really good shop will be able to handle both tasks for you at the same time.
Author Unknown
JIM
Lowering a C5
YES
Linear Mode
