Hi Ed
When I first got my td I was disappointed in the hard ride. It felt like the suspension was too stiff. I talked to people about softening the ride by reducing the spring rate. This forum offered up a lot of good ideas. I let some air out of the front tires(now 15#) and then the rear(25 #). This helped. then I crawled under the car and bouced it up and down. To my surprise, it only had 1″ of travel before it stopped solid. It was the shocks bottoming out. I removed the bootom of the shock and I then had 4″ of travel. took the car for a ride and was amazed at the smoothness of the ride! No more bottoming out! I measured the shock compressed lenght and found it to be about 14 ” I thought this must be the wrong shock so I looked up the specs on the monroe 31538 monroematic and the comp lenght was 14.1 inch. I did some reading on the thesamba.com site about vw suspension and found that They seem to know what they are talking about. They don’t advise using the shock or the travel of the ball joint to be the “stop” or bottoming block(or the full extension stop) They weld in a hook to stop the suspension. You might just scan through their forum to get some ideas of your own. I like the ride height and softness or rate of my springs. and didn’t want to go through the work and expense of changing the whole front axel assy just to get the ride height to match my shocks, so I opted for shorter shocks with bumper stops to give me the travel I need to stop bottoming out. I’ll let you know how it works out as soon as the shocks get here. These are not air charged shocks.
Thanks
Chuck