Lowering the front of the DeLorean

When I purchased my car the front of the car was still in the nose up position which the cars were shipped in at the factory. This had been done at the last minute by DMC in order to meet the new federal bumper and headlight height requirements (which have since been lowered).

There are several ways to ‘lower’ the car. The original way owners would lower their car was to remove all 4 springs, put the front springs in the back (thus lowering the back) and cutting off some portion of the rear springs and placing them on the front. Cars done this way I suspect are at the originally intended height, but it puts the car so low to the ground that there would be hardly a driveway or speed bump you wouldn’t bottom out on. So the best compromise is to lower only the front of the car. I would not recommend cutting the springs. Springs are made to have a progressive amount of flex. Cutting the springs would change this drastically. So the best bet is to replace the front springs with a set of the ‘euro’ springs from P.J. Grady. These springs come in 1", 1.5" and 2" versions . The nose of my car was 1.5 inches higher at the front wheel well than the back so I bought the 1.5" springs. As you can see from the photo, the new springs have a lot more coils and are slightly shorter than the old stock springs. After installing the springs the front of the car was only one half inch lower, but it settled down over the next 2 weeks.

This is really not the kind of job you should do at home, or alone. If you want to see a detailed breakdown on how to remove and repair every part of the front suspension, take a look at the back issues of the DeLorean Club of Oregon newsletter (in Acrobat format) at http://www.dmcnews.com/faq/deco.htm. The series of articles starts with issue 13. I ended up having to do something quite different to remove the springs. At the Midas shop I conned into doing this, we used a spring compressor tool that fit inside the spring. The bottom of the tool was hooked to the lower arm and the spring was compressed onto the lower arm. Then we removed the lower arm from the car, released the spring, put the new spring on the arm and reversed the procedure. We could find no way to compress the springs from the outside. The compressor tools the shop had would not fit into such a small space with so many obstructions.

After you change the springs, get the car aligned. There is no camber adjustments but the caster will change with the new lowered position of the car. This is all a lot of work and the springs are not cheap but the results are well worth it.The car 'looks' right, visibility improves and so does the overall handling.