I've been fighting with the ride height of my car for a while now and I'm slowly losing my mind (and wallet). When I first put in the stock springs with new struts/mounts/isolators and 1" spacers in 2019? or so the car sat level and it was great. After doing a TSD event the rear hunkered down and won't go back up. I've emptied the trunk and reset the control arms a couple times and it still sits only 0.5" higher than stock. While resetting the arms again I had the sway bar unbolted and when I went to put it back I noticed that it doesn't line up evenly, I have to connect one end and then jack up the hub on the other side to get the bolt in. No clue what's going on there, my hope is just that the garage floor isn't level enough or something.
To try and at least get the car to sit level I took a spacer out of the fronts so they now have a 0.5" spacer. Reset the control arms, settled the suspension, etc and the drivers front still sits at 1" above stock and more concerningly the passenger front is 1.5" above stock. I've measured it front a couple different points in case the fenders are wonky and it's the same, 0.5" higher on the passenger side. I don't think the springs are side specific but I pulled both struts out (they look and measure identical) and swapped the whole assemblies so now the drivers front strut is on the passenger front side of the car and vice versa and the passenger side is still 0.5" higher. I slapped them in loosely so the swaybar is disconnected at both ends, the control arm nuts are loose, etc. As far as I can tell the only things that control ride height are the strut assembly, the strut tower, and the knuckle so again I have no clue what's going on, if any of you guys do please share. It's just a mac strut so not exactly fancy.
At this point I've half given up and decided to just replace the front strut mounts because the drivers side has gotten very sloppy, ditch the front spacers and swap the springs side to side because why not. I stripped the front strut assemblies apart and found that the passenger damper seems to be bad, it's not totally blown but it's way easier to compress than the drivers side, it comes up way more slowly and it doesn't extend fully on its own. I also found the bearing in that mount has a bit of play too, not as bad as the drivers side but I'm glad I ordered 2 new ones. I'm not very impressed with KYB at the moment, that's 1 bad damper and 2 bad mounts in under 10k km. At $50/piece that's not good value either. I should probably pull the rears too and see if they're bad as well.
I know old cars have problems but is it really too much to want a car that sits level and brand name parts that don't disintegrate? I'm half tempted to just slap it back together and order the individual pieces to make coilovers to my own specs but if I can't even get a spacer lift to sit level there's no way I'll be able to do that correctly.