Stance XR / Pro Comp Coilovers

After mostly using what I would deem decent but “entry level” coilovers in the past, I wanted to try something higher tier. Of course, since this is going to be a street car, I didn’t go all out and buy crazy 3-way race units as that would be overkill and pointless.

My search for the coilovers was made simple when I visited Rishie at AutoRND to order in the Work XD9 wheels, as he had a couple sets of Stance XR (or Pro Comp, whatever they’re calling them nowadays) coilovers available. These were specially sprung down from 14K/12K rates to a more sensible 10K/8K, and revalved to match. The XRs are not made in Stance’s typical factory in Taiwan, but rather in Japan. And as rumor would have it, in the same factory that makes DG-5s. Specification wise, the XRs are nearly identical to DG-5s.

I’m excited to see how they perform. All the goodies are there: large 60mm damper casing, helper springs, inverted monotube shocks, pillowball mounts, and upgraded Swift springs (which are made of stronger material, thus requiring less coils and are comparably lighter and more consistent).

The car came with RZ/Bathurst Showa coilovers with RS-R springs, not a bad setup, but needed to be removed nonetheless.

I started with the rear of the car.

Side-by-side:

Installed, which was a piece of cake:

Then the fronts…

Side-by-side:

The fronts were harder to work on than the rears. It can be tricky reinstalling everything. Namely, there is a spacer on the lower control arm that can be pushed out via compression to grant easier access for the coilover’s bottom mount. Although I’ve changed coilovers on 2 RX-7s in the past, it has been too long so I forgot and had to refigure it out.

Stance includes a brake line holder for the front coilovers. However, I felt that the holder had too many parts and complexity to perform such a basic function, so I opted to use zipties and a length of tygon tubing instead; like I did here with my old 600RR’s brake lines. That’s right, I favored zipties as the more elegant solution.

Because of my OCD, installing these coilovers spanned into 2 days when it should have taken 1 afternoon, max. That is because whenever I disassemble anything, I like to thoroughly clean and wipe down the area. Never mind the fact that the wheel wells will get dirty again on the first drive, or that people won’t even be able to see it… I am still compelled to do it. All nuts and bolts removed were scrubbed down and then administered anti-seize.

Prior to installing the XRs, I set the springs to zero preload as best I could. I’m still only halfway done with these coilovers, as once the car is back on the ground, I’ll have to dial in the ride height and then get an alignment.