I'm on BC's on my '98 S70 T5. I think they're a good solution for giving you options when it comes to ride height. For me, I found that the default spring rates absolutely sucked. There was a thread somewhere around here where I recall that someone said you want 9K's for the front and 5K's for the rear, as opposed to 5K in the front and 4K in the rear which is BC's default. I followed this advice and found the ride quality to be good for daily driving. Just be aware that the dampening and rebound adjustability on the BC BR series coilovers also kind of suck (a common observation for all BC BR coilovers, not just for our cars). The first 15-20 clicks of adjustment don't really do much. Additionally, you can go too low on these coilovers to the point that the shocks can poke into your CV axle boots. I had this happen to one of my axle boots and am having to replace it.

 

Gotcha, not wanting to completely slam the car as it is daily driven and I live in Chicago, you went with 9k front at 5k rear for spring rates? How low did you go in addition to how they come out of the box for it to hit the axle boot?

 

The spring rates as they come from BC are completely the wrong rates for the car. Not sure how they messed it up so badly. It should be 9k front, 6k rear on wagons; 9k front, 5k rear on sedans. As they come, they’re awful. With the proper spring rates and matched valving, they’re great.


There are other options as well if you don’t wanna get as fancy:

You can go with genuine Volvo S70 AWD non-Nivomat shocks. These are a couple hundred bucks a pop. Just keep in mind you need to pair them with non-Nivomat, non-XC V70 AWD rear springs. This will give you stock height and good ride quality. Nothing fancy, but quite good.

You can also use any FWD shock you want and convert them to AWD shocks using QA1 BAR505K t-bar kits and press them into the shock for use with the AWD control arms. Like any other non-Nivo solution, you’ll need non-Nivo AWD springs. This will give you stock height with slightly firmer/better shocks depending on what you pick.

If you don’t wanna forever be at stock ride height, you can lower it in back using BNE Dynamics adjustable spring perches with any off-the-shelf 3” diameter linear spring that has a spring rate you like. I’d suggest somewhere around 600 (pretty soft) - 900 (quite stiff) lb/in. You can then match it up front using the front half of any FWD lowering spring kit you want.

What I did for my AWD (before I ripped the AWD out and delta link swapped it, which was the best choice I’ve ever made on that car) was:

Front: Bilstein B4, front springs from H&R 29955 lowering kit

Rear: FWD rear Bilstein B4, QA1 BAR505K t-bars, BNE adjustable perches, Eibach 600lb 8” linears.

This setup gave me great handling, an inch and a half of lowering, and better-than-stock ride comfort. Only change I’d make of doing it again would be using ~700lb springs, since the 600lb springs were a touch too soft and bouncy for my liking.

I do have a ton of the AWD parts laying around, including those spring perches - if you wanna scoop anything up, shoot me a PM. Happy wrenching!

 

Thanks for the info! Beautiful car man, From what I’m seeing on BC’s website, you can get different spring rates front the front, but not the rear. I’ll call them and ask Monday but I’ve read a few people saying the default spring rates are way off.

 

The default spring rates are wrong. Corner/axle weighing the car, measuring the suspension geometry and then using eibachs coilover design calculator is where I got those #s from, circa 2018. Several years later they were discovered to be identical to KWs spring rates.

Of note! those are for FWD cars. Rear is completely different on awd.

 

Okay so the default rates currently from BC for the 2000 awd v70 are wrong? There’s only adjustability on their website for the front spring rates. The only option for the rear rate currently is 11kg. Apologies if I’m missing something here.

 

I believe, have to check or re-calculate, that the appropriate rear spring rate is 12 kg/mm.