Can This Russian Nut-and-Bolt Wrench Suspension Beat Air Springs? Yes, Very, Very Slowly

The concept is simple: the driver pushes a button, and magic happens – the car sits higher or lower, depending on the situation. The engineering behind it is a bit more complex: an air compressor, air tanks, lines, bellows (commonly referred to as ‘airbags,’ but that’s a bit confusing), sensors, and whatnot.

To increase the ground clearance of an air-suspension vehicle, the compressor – or air pump – pushes air into the bladders (bags, bellows, flexible rubber air springs – they all mean the same thing), which force the cars’ body upward. Conversely, when a lower center of gravity is required, the air is released from said elastomeric containers via a set of valves, and the car sits closer to the road.

Air suspension isn’t new – it dates back to WWII – and the auto industry quickly realized it could make a profit out of wartime mechanical ingenuity. But there is a price to be paid for this somewhat complicated suspension system. That’s a literal price – it is costlier to make, install, maintain, repair, and replace than the traditional metal spring-damper combination. You can learn more about this from the second video.

But what if a purely mechanical, easy, simple, cheap, and reliable adjustable suspension system existed? Challenge accepted, said one Russian car nut, who went on to sketch his ideas on paper. He then mailed his ideas to the readily available wrenching team from Garage 54, who put them to work.

The detailed build is shown in the first video, but the basic idea is this: take a solid nut and secure it to the strut tower. Take a matching robust bolt welded to the damper, thread it to the mentioned nut, and that’s it. Well, almost. The system is in place but needs something else: a wrench, ratchet socket wrench, or anything that will fasten/unfasten the bolt.

The relative travel of the bolt through the nut will dictate the ride height adjustment. The system is downright genius – like all other Garage 54 inventions; I should point out (even when they don’t work, that’s just another eliminated option, not a failure).

Granted, getting the car to sit at the desired height takes a little while. With the setup they built, the Siberians achieved a 95-mm suspension travel, dictated mainly by the length of the constant-velocity axle shafts in their front-wheel-driven Lada Samara. The exclusively manual operation of the system isn’t an incentive for this type of assembly design.

I suspect this can be mechanized in one form or another. High-torque electric motors would be the most obvious solution. Still, I could think of an engine-driven coupling that could do the same thing. If you have suggestions on how this setup could work faster (it takes a lot of time to hand-wrench the car’s ride height), drop it down in the comments.