"This basically sets the height of the spring for the duration of its life," says Krumme. The spring loses a small portion of its height here, but that's all worked into the equation in the engineering.




[h=2]SCCA: How it’s made[/h] Thursday, 02 June 2016


Philip Royle (words and images)








Above: Eibach makes its shocks in house. Once the shock bodies are cut to length, the housings that are made of mild steel are super heated so the bottoms can be bent closed.
Next is the dress-up portion, involving a chemical bath and powder coating, which is followed by a quality check. "The last step is bringing the springs into the quality check department," says Krumme. "They're measured, rated, and tested." Truth be known, this is actually the second quality check, as the initial check happens right after the springs come off the Wafios.
During that quality check, Eibach is looking for no more than an extremely minimal variance on the target spring rate. If you're looking for a tighter spread, Eibach offers its Platinum line, which boasts half a percent variance. "Our Platinum race springs are made from a super high tensile material and the spring winding technology makes them extremely compliant," Krumme says. "They're lightweight and give you a lot of control, and we provide a dyno chart for each one of these springs."
Eibach also produces its swaybars in house, which makes sense when you realize the production process is all but identical to that of a spring, albeit on different machines (At left: Once bent into shape, the ends of the swaybars are then super heated and pressed into the correct form). The swaybars are made from spring steel, so they follow the same basic production methods. "They're bent, taken to end forming, then tempered and shot peened," he says. During the process, quality control checks are made. "Swaybars get jigged up after the first bend and after the end forming," Krumme tells us, "and then those get their turn in the quality control department, too, before leaving the building."
Around the corner from all of this, in the same innocent looking warehouse, is damper production. "We have mild steel and stainless steel tubes," Krumme explains of the process that turns metal tubes into finished dampers in a surprisingly small corner of the warehouse. "For the stainless, we'll TIG on the end caps, and for the mild steel, we super heat the end and smash it shut. After that, they all get pressure tested."
From there, a CNC machine either cuts threads onto the body or places a circlip mount, and then the body heads to the coating department. "For some mild steel, we shot peen them and then have them powder coated, while others get sent to zinc," explains Krumme. "For stainless, we get them electro-polished. Then they go into assembly."
The assembly procedure begins with honing the innards of the damper so it seals correctly to the gas piston o-ring and the piston wipers, then the internals stuffed inside the body by a machine that does said stuffing and oil filling in one fell swoop. Meanwhile, anything with a shrader valve or that's a coilover gets assembled by hand.
Like the springs and swaybars, the shocks also go through quality control, where every shock is tested on a dyno.
It turns out, not every component that leaves this facility does so with an Eibach logo painted on the side – Eibach private labels components for a number of manufacturers. But it's not just other aftermarket companies that use Eibach's facility for its products, oh no. "Companies like McLaren, Lotus, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Audi, and Porsche are all looking to us for the private labeling of parts," Krumme says.
As we head back out of the facility, winding past the salt bath machine where prototype parts bathe for more than 500 hours, and near the machine that puts the same springs through a torturous multi-hundred-thousand compression thrill ride, we find ourselves awed by how much the entire process makes perfect sense, when you think about it. At the same time, we find ourselves pondering all kinds of other questions, like shot peening and tempering – how the heck does that work?