1st Gen JCW Most liked posts in thread: Refreshing Rufus - 2005 MCS JCW

Kuda does make stunning mounts for the R53. They have one that mounts to a down-tube, so it's down near the radio and the other (mine) that clips into the dash. You buy 2 components... the car-specific bit that adapts to the dash and presents a flat surface and then a device-specific bit that fits your GPS/phone/etc. You bolt the two together when they arrive. I love the dash mount shown above as I can modify it. In my first R53, I mounted a pan-head swivel (like the top of a tripod), with a tripod screw for a camera mount. You can see the current radar detector mod. That sucker is VERY firmly attached and is completely removable with no screws, etc.

 

The right detector depends on how you use it. When I'm in VA (rarely), I don't run a detector. It's not a factor for me. I thought about it, but I'm just not there very often for it to make a difference. I do have a couple of spots around Charlotte that always trigger a detector (at least it triggered my old one, which was 10+ years old). I always wanted a way to tell it "When I'm right here at this intersection, I want you to ignore Ka band as I know that the bank on the corner has auto-open doors which use Ka and I just don't need to hear the alarm for the 100th+ time as I drive to work every day, you stupid F-ing detector." In my use-case, the R7 made more sense.

 

I haven't updated this thread in a long while with actual work on Rufus. My wife was away last weekend, visiting family, so I decided to get out and enjoy some time in the garage... tackling some projects that were planned a long while ago but never seemed to get done.

1. Refreshing the foam in the rear hatch vents. Way back when I started this thread, I had noticed that the foam just under the rear hatch was in sad shape. I didn't realize exactly how bad it had gotten! The foam practically disintegrated when I touched it... it just turned to dust! Even picking up the old bits of foam was difficult. A bit of cleaning and some new foam (window AC unit filter material) fixed this issue:



2. Rear coil over dampening extenders: A few years back I installed Colin Greene's modified BC coil-overs. I bought the extender cables so that I could adjust the rear units dampening settings on the fly, but I never got around to installing them. It takes a bit of knowledge of where to drill and I just never put the time into figuring out where the right place is (plus you have to drop the suspension to do the install). With several hours of free time, I decided to get busy.

You have to remove the rear seats and the two rear side panels. Once you get through all of that, you can drop the rear suspension (I did one at a time), drill the hole, pass up the extender cable and fix it to the coil-over top. Then it's just a matter of returning everything back to as it should be. I drilled holes in the 'trunk' space to pass the adjustment knobs out of. You could just leave 'em in the space behind the plastic side trim and use the trunk access panels to reach them, but I thought they would look cool like this:



Really, the most difficult part of this is knowing where to drill so you come out directly on top of the coil overs. I watched a few YouTube videos and noticed the weld spots. You can see 4 of the 5 weld spots around the the base of the cable, above. I drew a little diagram to show you where to drill, if you ever need to know:








Honestly, I rarely see myself adjusting the dampers. If I'm going on a long highway cruise, I sometimes soften up the fronts, just to make that drive a bit more pleasant. A few years back I dialed the fronts to full soft, made the 3 hour highway drive to MOTD then dialed them back to a normal setting once I got there. Most of the time I leave 'em set 5 or 6 clicks from full-hard (on an 18-click scale, if I remember correctly).

I was very surprised at how much feel I got through the extenders. I can feel the same detents on the damper settings just like if I were using the knob on the top of the strut.