Camber settings and lowered shocks

I've written you a little decission making script to help you along.

#!/usr/bin/perl my $others, $action;

print "Were the others you talked to mates, or a garage?:"; my $others= ; chomp $others;

if ($others=='Mates') { $action == s/Mates/Garage/g; } elsif ($others == 'Garage'){ $action == 'Find New garage'; } else { $action == 'so it was neither and you are making it up?'; }

print $action."\n";

That has to win the award for geekiest joke ever made in uk.rec.cars.modifictions.

LOL though :D

(fellow geek)

I haven't checked the code runs, but it should do.

Oh dear :)

Of course you do. If you change any aspect of the suspension, you're changing the geometry. If you want to keep any semblence of ride and handling, you need to have ALL the geometry reset - not just the camber. It's not particularly expensive - my local Rover dealer charges £49 plus VAT for a full four-wheel geometry check and reset.

Yes. Your mates are like all the other clueless gimps who drop the suspension 40mm then wonder why the front tyres get scrubbed off 1000 miles later.

You need to get both the camber and track checked.

Indeed, go find somewhere with a laser alignment bay thingy - they are the muts. If you're down south, i would suggest Micheldever Tyres (just north of Winchester). Think its cost about £20 for a full check and adjustment, and you ghet an A4 printout at the end with all the values (you wont understand it, but it looks impressive :))

It Does ;-)

Matt (Yes i work in IT too)

it depends on what you change your suspension to ;)

if you think about it logically, the compressed suspension on most cars means that the wheel comes out at the bottom to keep the wheel in the straight up position because it's been designed to go round corners like that and not driven in a straight line like that that's also why the links at the bottom of the suspension are always travelling in an arc because of the way they are fixed to the body the top of the strut provides the angle movement to compensate

when you lower the car you make it handle better simply because you lower the centre of gravity but at the same time, if you don't do it properly you just end up with a car that skips over the bumps because it's not been set up properly

lower the car by all means, but make sure it's not a harsh ride and that everything is done to make sure the wheels move in the same way as they are designed to

The local tyre place charges £15 and it never seems to be spot on.

Next time I go up to Leeds I'm getting it laser tracked at Alba, who got it perfect last time, but they charge £25. If anyone knows of anyone else doing laser tracking in Leeds for less money, being told would be nice :P.

What rubbish! As if it mattered. By the time your tyres are scrubbed out they will be out of fashion and you'll need a new set anyway.

Either that or you'd have left all the tread behind in Tesco's carpark doing wheelspins.

"tosh" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@corp.supernews.com...

If you lower or otherwise modify your suspension in any way then all the other settings are now likely to be wrong for the new ride height. It all depends on the type of suspension you have at either end and how it has been implemented. Most modern cars use what's cheapest to produce - McPherson strut with TCA and tie rod / arb at the front and either a chapman strut or a torsion beam at the back. It's entirely possible that your nice new lowered suspension is now operating within a range that has totally different camber change to standard, this is of course coupled to the rate of the new springs and dampers. Depending on the manufacturer of the setup it could range from one that is optimised to suit the new lowered ride height - or alternatively they could have gone for ultra stiff to disguise the crap geometry they have imposed upon you. Bear in mind that this applies to the castor as well - especially if you have the usual compromise setup of TCA and anti roll bar acting as the other element of the lower 'wishbone'. In short - you could need your tracking, your camber and your castor reset. Not all of these are adjuctable on a great many modern cars. Then there's the suspension mounting points which are now sitting lower than before and causing the arcs through which your suspension moves to be quite different to standard. I love the fact that people destroy millions of quids worth of manufacturer engineering R&D because they want the wheels to fill the arches a litttle more. Lowered suspension - dontcha just love it :-)

Q: How many cars have camber adjustment as standard? A: Not many.

Even if it has adjustable camber it may not have enough adjustment range left to compensate for the lowering. Unlike a race chassis they design domestic cars adjusters to compensate for build tolerances at nominal ride height not for easy modifications.

If it's out of spec you wind up buying slotted adaptor plates for the strut tops or file a slot in the attachment plate at the bottom of the strut for the upper bolt to adjust the angle between strut and steering knuckle or en-centric bushes for the lower arm. Same sort of stuff may be needed at the rear on multilink or trailing arm suspension. Cheap FWD cars (often the ones that are badly lowered) tend to have a swing arm or some sort of beam for rear suspension, these have camber and toe in fixed by the angle the stub shaft is attached at and nothing short of bending the the arm or subframe will adjust it.

-- Peter Hill Spamtrap reply domain as per NNTP-Posting-Host in header Can of worms - what every fisherman wants. Can of worms - what every PC owner gets!

actually my mate is a driving instructor and is not into custom cars, so I guess apart from his pupils doing in his tyres!

Tosh

manufacturer

Well for sure this mark 6/7 ford escort looks like a bloody tractor and with lower profile tyres it will look worst, dropping it about 35mm is to make the bugger look better in my opinion anyways.

I also thought this was a car mod group, well for sure there seems a lot of anti-mod pratts in here.

As for those who gave sound advise, thanks.

Tosh

Agreed. I have no choice but to pay the Rover price though (although it is a full laser jobbie, so I don't mind) - nowhere else can adjust the rear wheels on the 600, for some reason :)

manufacturer

Seconded.

Even better, is the fact that your average UK road is bumpy as hell. The last thing you want to do is make the suspension any stiffer !

Lowered Car + Corner + Bump = Comedy

Oh sorry - wrong answer it seems. Ok- I'll try again.

Lower your escort as much as you like and don't bother with resetting the suspension - it doesn't need it. Go for springs as stiff as you can manage and regardless of what the facts are you should remain utterly convinced that it's actually better to have less effective suspension travel on Britain's under maintained roads. Job done.

P.S. If it loooks worse with lower profile tyres then they will be the wrong size because regardless of the rim size and the aspect ratio of the tyres, both the overall circumference and diameter of the wheel / tyre combo should be the same as standard.

Regardless of all of the above, you did say it was a MK 6/7 escort - whatever that is - so TBH it's probably going to end up better than factory no matter what mods you inflict on it.

Maybe where you live that is the case.

Others have bigger humps to overcome.

I read somewhere there was a technique to getting over bumps and humps that involved braking early and sharpish, to make the front of the car dip, then on the rebound upwards, the car is negotiating the hump and this somehow makes the journey over the obstacle easier.

I thought about that and tried it, but it never seemed to make much odds. If your dampers are working, you won't really have that much rebound to play with anyway. I've sometimes found that accelerating onto humps helps a little, but it seems to depend on the hump.

There are definitely varying sizes of humps. I can straddle lots of them in my Ka, but there are others that are wider and have to be driven over at idle in first gear if you give a s**te about your suspension. The first kind can't be felt at 40mph upwards unless you misjudge them badly, and the second kind cause people to slow down so much that I imagine having one outside your house must be a nightmare. The ones that are just lumps of tarmac in the middle of the road are a waste of time, and don't slow down anyone who has the first idea about driving.