I had to replace the shocks and struts on my daily driver ('97 9000 Aero) so I figured, "While I'm at it..." I'd raise the car up a little bit. I live in an area that gets major frost heaves and gets a lot of snow and though I've hardly ever scraped the underside of the car the front bumper lip has taken a beating.
I already had SAS 1/2" spacers for the rear (same as a C900, though you can only use one set due to the shape of the spring) so I settled on lifting the car 1/2". The rear is straightforward (other than a lot of work necessary to get the rusted rear shock bolts out). To get the front lifted up I had to make a spacer to go between the body and the strut mount. I started by drawing the spacer in SolidWorks
- Spacer.jpg (32.38 KiB) Viewed 4190 times
I then cut out the hole patterns for four spacers in a 12"x12" sheet of HDPE on the Bridgeport at work. I could have done it at home on my drill press but the mill is just much more accurate and I needed something to do at lunch time.
I used a circle cutter for the large hole, looks like this:
They're not super accurate but if you just need a big hole they're better than hole saws. They're pretty cheap and you can use them in drill presses if you want.
For the external geometry I just printed out the drawing of the spacer, cut it out of paper, and used it as a stencil. I used a jig saw to cut the spacers out of the sheet of plastic. A band saw with a small blade would have been better but the jig saw worked fine.
The external geometry is hidden once it's mounted
I put elliptical bolts in the struts so I can align it.
