I've had these things installed for a few weeks now and feel ready to make a review. I'll spoil it for those who don't want to read: I'm not removing these tophats. All these pix are in my project thread, but the tophats rock so much that I wanted to make a special thread for them here.
TEIN pillowball upper mount (p/u mount) is installed on the rear. This gives you ~10mm extra shock travel over stock NB tophats. They look pretty, and they control the lateral travel well. But they're NOTHING compared to the dp6061 hats that give you TWO INCHES of extra shock travel.
Out of the box: I got 2 tophats, a bunch of washers, and 4 inserts for the spherical bushings to match the width of my shock shaft. Having NB TEIN HAs, I needed the smaller inserts. They fit both the shock shaft and the bushings perfectly. Zero tolerance I think the install notes called them? Good name.
The directions call for something to build up the threaded area to allow the nut to properly tighten down the tophat. I had about 1/2" of space between the bottom of the threads and the top of the tophat. I was able to make up this space with the included washers, but I wasn't totally in love with that. I dug through my box of suspension parts and found some spare TEIN collars (the big thing between the hat and the nut) to make up the space. It looks to limit the lateral movement, but that's not actually so. I put this all together without springs and jacked up the suspension. At full compression, the collar doesn't hit the side of the tophat hole.
Kinda difficult to see what's going on here. The green circle shows the frame making contact with the upper a-arm. This happens before the TEIN bumpstop even makes contact. I blame my NB HA kit. Not a lot of guys running them on an NA. Anyways, something needed to be done.
I had some new NB bumpstops in my box of suspension goodies. I trimmed off the first segment and installed them in place of the TEIN bumps. TEIN bumper is in my hand. The NB one is installed. Also, this is the front NB bumpstop. I didn't have a new set of rears, but they're pretty similar anyway. Fronts are stiffer and tan. Rears are softer and pink. I wanted some stiffness to help combat frame hits.
The NB stoppers make contact before the frame does and require a good squish. In 3 weeks of driving over some pretty crappy roads, I've never heard or felt any suspension slamming of frame contact in the rear, so I'm fairly confident that my longer bumpstops are effective. The NB bumper is visible peaking out in this shot.
This is what zero spring pre-load looks like. The collars are ALL the way down at the bottom. This gave me 10.5" ride height in the rear. I applied some preload to raise that by .75". So at 11.75", I've got about as much travel as I would have at 14" ride height with the TEIN tophats.
Overall, these are a great product. I'd recommend them to anyone. I've never had a more comfortable ride in a lowered Miata. http://www.dp6061.com
TEIN pillowball upper mount (p/u mount) is installed on the rear. This gives you ~10mm extra shock travel over stock NB tophats. They look pretty, and they control the lateral travel well. But they're NOTHING compared to the dp6061 hats that give you TWO INCHES of extra shock travel.
Out of the box: I got 2 tophats, a bunch of washers, and 4 inserts for the spherical bushings to match the width of my shock shaft. Having NB TEIN HAs, I needed the smaller inserts. They fit both the shock shaft and the bushings perfectly. Zero tolerance I think the install notes called them? Good name.
The directions call for something to build up the threaded area to allow the nut to properly tighten down the tophat. I had about 1/2" of space between the bottom of the threads and the top of the tophat. I was able to make up this space with the included washers, but I wasn't totally in love with that. I dug through my box of suspension parts and found some spare TEIN collars (the big thing between the hat and the nut) to make up the space. It looks to limit the lateral movement, but that's not actually so. I put this all together without springs and jacked up the suspension. At full compression, the collar doesn't hit the side of the tophat hole.
Kinda difficult to see what's going on here. The green circle shows the frame making contact with the upper a-arm. This happens before the TEIN bumpstop even makes contact. I blame my NB HA kit. Not a lot of guys running them on an NA. Anyways, something needed to be done.
I had some new NB bumpstops in my box of suspension goodies. I trimmed off the first segment and installed them in place of the TEIN bumps. TEIN bumper is in my hand. The NB one is installed. Also, this is the front NB bumpstop. I didn't have a new set of rears, but they're pretty similar anyway. Fronts are stiffer and tan. Rears are softer and pink. I wanted some stiffness to help combat frame hits.
The NB stoppers make contact before the frame does and require a good squish. In 3 weeks of driving over some pretty crappy roads, I've never heard or felt any suspension slamming of frame contact in the rear, so I'm fairly confident that my longer bumpstops are effective. The NB bumper is visible peaking out in this shot.
This is what zero spring pre-load looks like. The collars are ALL the way down at the bottom. This gave me 10.5" ride height in the rear. I applied some preload to raise that by .75". So at 11.75", I've got about as much travel as I would have at 14" ride height with the TEIN tophats.
Overall, these are a great product. I'd recommend them to anyone. I've never had a more comfortable ride in a lowered Miata. http://www.dp6061.com