Hopefully some machinist will read this who also has enough knowledge of cars that this post will make sense.
I own a 1988 Porsche 944. The front struts are unitized; that is, the caps that hold the inserts into the housing are crimped on. I can only replace them as a complete unit. They're made by Sachs/Boge, which is not a big plus in my book.
Earlier cars used a threaded cap at the top of the strut tube to hold the insert in. Those struts are rebuildable by unscrewing the cap and simply replacing the insert. Bilstein makes inserts for these struts, and new Bilstein inserts are significantly cheaper than the new Sachs/Boge assemblies. (win/win, better dampers *and* cheaper too!)
From what I've been told, the two assemblies are not directly interchangeable due to differences in the way they mount to the steering knuckle (there were some suspension geometry changes between the '86 and '87 model years, when the non-rebuildable struts were introduced.)
So here's why I'm posting to this newsgroup and not an automotive group
- I have a pair of '87-88 style struts that are shot. I paid $20 to have them shipped to me so I could play with them (so if I screw them up, I'm out the cost of a semi-expensive dinner.) I have my suspicions that if I grind the crimped caps off of them that I will find that they are otherwise identical to the earlier struts in terms of the tube and insert. If that is the case, would it be possible to simply have a machinist cut threads in the top of the strut housing tubes? I'm not sure what the implications are of trying to turn something this big and unbalanced in a lathe, is that a problem?
If you can tell me that this *should* work, I'm going to try to find a set of junk early struts as well, and will gleefully start cutting stuff up :)
thanks,
nate