Adjustable Camber Arms vs. Whiteline Camber Bushings
 

I am looking to do either the GTSPEC Adjustable Rear Control Arms or the Whiteline KCA326 Camber Bushings. At this time I can't do both. The adjustable arms seem like a better solution for range of adjustment and ease of use whereas the bushing set seems like it wouldn't be as easy for a lineup shop to get right.

Are there any cons to doing the adjustable arms only? I would eventually replace the bushings when they come out with something that is just a bushing and not an adjustment piece.

I always doubt whether it's a good idea to adjust the lower control arm to get a camber we want. Besides the control arm, there's the lateral link and trail link in the lower portion, so once you change the length of the lower arms, you must adjust the lateral link to maintain a proper toe, and I don't know how the fixed length trail link will affect the geometry, but I think there must be some.

I think it's better to adjust the upper A arm, since it's the only arm in the upper portion, and its joint point is almost right above the driveshaft, so the side effect of adjusting it can be minimal. And the stress on the upper arm is way smaller than lower arms, I think maybe that's the reason why people usually prefer to have the upper arm adjustable in a double A configuration.

That makes sense. I am on the fence for the bushing primarily due to install difficulty and not sure if I can tackle it on my own.

according to motoIQ's "A Tech Look Under the Scion FR-S!", the rear upper arm is heavy, so if you don't like the whiteline bushing, maybe you may hold a while for some upcoming complete upper arm.

I need some camber adjustment ASAP. Dropped on KW's and need to correct it a bit.

Then I suppose now you've got too much negtive camber in the rear, right? Since negtive camber is a good thing generally, maybe you have a choice to leave it and add some more negtive camber in the front, to balance out the potential understeer, then you can have a car with higher grip limitation:D

Too much is just as bad as not enough.

As for the OP: The Whiteline bushings are certainly the less expensive solution. But they are harder to install and not as easy to adjust. Control arms will be quite a bit more pricey, but a lot easier to install and adjust. What works for you?

The problem with the bushings is that I don't have a press and have no idea how much a shop will charge to install. I could buy a press and give it a go and it would be the less expensive route but if it didn't work out and I have to take it to a shop then I would probably be at the same $ amount as just buying adjustable arms, that is if it works with control arms only and not the trailing arms and toe adjusters too.

[QUOTE=Borden;431910] Besides the control arm, there's the lateral link and trail link in the lower portion, so once you change the length of the lower arms, you must adjust the lateral link to maintain a proper toe, and I don't know how the fixed length trail link will affect the geometry, but I think there must be some.

OP,
The trailing arm your referring to will affect the caster portion of your rear alignment. So if you adjust your camber with the rear lower control arm then you'll have to adjust the toe (lateral link) and adjust the caster (trailing arm) which by the way is a fixed length. You'll be better off using the Whiteline bushings and being done with the alignment.

[quote=GC_Adam;432115]I'm gonna go talk with a "performance" alignment shop during lunch and see what they recommend. They will be doing the alignment and corner balance so I guess they should know if there is enough adjustment in the other components as well as provide an estimate for bushing install. I'll report back in an hour or so.

[quote=GC_Adam;432115]That's very informative, thanks! I will dig this deeper later:thanks:

To get the one bushing out of the arm a press doesn't work. You need to pry them out with an air hammer and chisel.

The biggest hassle though is just getting the arms on and off.

Whiteline designed an upper arm and had prototypes years ago but it ended up being something that couldn't be easily mass-produced and they didn't ever make them.

http://www.iwsti.com/forums/gr-suspe...u-wrx-sti.html

And there is an adjustable toe link available if the height/camber makes it so you run out of adjustment.

My god my head is spinning.

The line up shop said that the bushings are a weak way to go if I'm trying to even out both sides because the adjustment is in the bushing not the bolt. Just press the bushings in and that's where you will live with it.

They said the control arms are a better option in their opinion but they have not worked on this car yet to know if there is enough adjustment in the toe once the control arm is changed out. They don't think it will be a problem but won't truly know until they try it out. Didn't even address caster from the trailing arm with them but they didn't bring it up either so maybe it's not a big deal.

I am starting to think that it may be a better choice to just do the front camber plates and have them align the rear the best they can. I need to raise the rear up by 1/2" anyway so some of the camber will come back out.

The camber bushings are adjustable.

But how much camber are you trying to get?

I just picked up a set of whiteline bushings at PRE Racing yesterday for $160 bucks to correct my rear camber issue then had the car realigned to address the new tires installed over the weekend. Anticipate approximately 2 hours of labor costs for installation. PRE offered to do the install for $85 an hour for labor, but I chose to have another group install the bushings. Note that I only did the Eibach prokit lowering springs.

May I ask what's your before&after camber?

[quote=digital_assassin;432124]Unless your tracking the car, and even then, I don't recommend the corner balance. I got mine done and I think a bit of a waste of $. The car was already near balanced since it was lowered evenly, but they balanced it anyways, which brought me to a "perfect" 50/50 cross weight. Especially if you're changing suspension heights and parts, it will change the corners. I went with the performance alignment also.

I am about 1.5" lower with -1.5/-2.5 degrees camber front/rear. I would prefer less rear neg camber, near a -1.5 deg.

[quote=brzranger;437036]Do you have any corners on the car that are noticeably at different heights now or is it still pretty uniform? They are only charging $100 and I do plan on tracking the car next spring but if the gains aren't that great and it's not aesthetically right I'll skip it.

Nearly equal ride height on the CORNERS before and after. If you are dropped evenly, save the $100, IMO.

If you are going to stay at a suspension setting or ride height, maybe do the corners once and call it good.

Hindsight, I wouldn't do the corners. Unless you are tracking more than 50% or have a lot of expendable cash B-)

All depends on what you are after. The arms will give you the best adjustment out there period and there are aftermarket toe/trailing arms along with control arms.

As far as corner balancing goes, that can be debated.

@FT-86 SpeedFactory - I'm going with the arms. Just deciding between Cusco or GTSPEC. If I go GTSPEC I will probably just wait until the new production run which happens in about 4-6 weeks from what they tell me.

Who is going to tune your suspension?
All too often people put on parts for a look and damage the dynamics of a car.
It’s like putting a bunch of parts on your engine with no tune eventuality things are just not going to work right and you need to know what you are doing to get back to a point where parts are working for you not against you.
Just something to think about as Rear Control Arms can dramatically change the handling of a car.
If you do this I would go with GTSPEC as they seem interested in helping and could give advice on setup.

It's going to AR Auto Service in Lake Oswego Oregon. They are a very good race inspired shop. There are a few other members on here that have installed rear control arms and it's working out fine for them. I'm looking to correct camber, not add some crazy -3 or more to get even lower and flush. I'm currently too low and will be bringing the car back up to about a 1.5" drop all around and then dialing in the alignment. I'm guessing that I have anywhere from -2.5 to -3 degrees at my current ride height and that's just too much. I think I also read somewhere, I may be mistaken though, that the bushing kit can only add camber and is not meant to dial it out.

Good glad you thought about it, sadly other often don’t.

Did not mean to take this thread off track…

@SpeedR - all valid points for this thread.

I dropped my car initially about 2", raised to about 1.5", got an alignment and corners; I realized i was changing the suspension geometry and rear neg camber more than I really wanted to.

To fix this, i would need to get some type of camber adjustment and roll center adjustment + labor to install + another alignment = $$$ and time.

I really like the stock handling and I really like how my ride is right now (except for -2.5 rear camber). I am considering raising it slightly to a 1" drop to minimize the affects on the geometry and camber w/o requiring more aftermarket parts = less $$$ and less $$$

If I had to do it all over again? I would still go w/ KW V3's and the wheels, drop to 1", get performance alignment and be done w/ the suspension side of it.

Why do you think -2.5 deg camber is too much? In regards to tire wear, supposedly (I'm no expert), it's toe that significantly affects tire wear; a good alignment will fix that. I would prefer more camber in front (-2.5 vs my -1.5) and less rear (-1.5 vs -2.5), but it's not a deal breaker.

Imo, for modding, we MUST alway know what r we exactly doing. On this matter, we should not rely on anyone else, no matter how professional or how kind they are, because experts can only suggest how to do sth, as to why you wanna do that, they will generally respect your will.

For your current issue, I believe you are not very sure about what you want. You said you may go tracking some day, but you want to reduce some camber from your stock arms, that looks not correct, not correct at all. Usually stock camber is far from sufficient for tracking, and aftermarket arms or bushings are usually for increasing negtive camber, so I really think it's a double waste to use these kits to reduce camber, for money and camber. It's a sign that you have already done sth wrong.

With the stock ride height, the lower control arms are pointing down from inside to outside, so when cornering, body rolls, then outside of your car sinks, then the lower control arm will push the low side of your wheel out, to automatically gain some negtive camber for your outside wheels, that's very good and useful.

But after lowered ride height too much, your lower control arms may be already level or even pointing up, so when cornering, the body roll will make the lower arm pull the low side of your wheel in, to gain some positive camber, that's bad! More worse is, when standstill, your negtive camber is too much yet, cause you have used that dynamic camber in advance by lowering, then you wants to reduce it, that's your current situation.

In short, don't reduce stock camber, if even the stock camber is too much for you, then you must have done something wrong.

Is this still true with a multilink setup? It's not a McPherson strut in the rear.

Nathan

I believe it must be true. To my understanding, the major difference between McPherson and double-A is the top pivot point, upper arm bushing or strut top mount.

@Borden - I am lowered on KW's and have taken it down farther than I like for this car. In doing so I've seen what the effects of lowering does to the camber on this vehicle as well as how it handles corners. I haven't aligned it just yet and am only guessing that the camber for the rears is verging on -3 based on visual appearance. I am going to bring it back up a bit to correct this to some degree but want to maintain about a 1.5" drop all around. This car has no camber adjustment built in, none. The only way to adjust and get the car where you want it is to buy something aftermarket. I originally posed the question because I was searching for information. You suggest in your post to know what it is you are doing before moding the car. That is why this thread was created was to explore the two options for my situation. I will not know exactly where the alignment specs should be for my driving until I try it out.

There are 2 options available. Camber Bushings or Adjustable Rear Control Arms. Camber Bushings will give me an advertised adjustment up to +/-.75 and stated by users to be more in the +/-.5 range. Control arms will give me a very wide range and are easily adjustable. If I go with bushings I may still need the arms to achieve an acceptable (to me) camber spec due to the narrow window of adjustment offered with bushings. If I go with arms I can adjust over a large range and if it changes the geometry too much I can add adjustable toe and swap trailing arms. An alignment will tell me if this is needed if the toe can't be corrected or things simply won't fit.

I am DDing this car until spring and at that time I will start putting it on the track. I may or may not turn it into a dedicated track car eventually but it will at least be out there on occasion. I want to set it up with -1.5 in the rear and -1.75 in the front as a starting point and see how it drives. To do this I will need camber plates up front to get to -1.75 and adjustable arms in the rear to be able to get back from the -3 I think I am at. Bushings wouldn't even get me back to -2.

I think there will be a lot of users on here who are looking for a great stance and still trying to achieve great performance. There is no boxed solution for this so we must ask questions, modify, adjust, and modify some more if necessary to achieve what we are looking for. With a new platform, trial and error is how we learn.

Wow, if there's any offence, I'm so sorry, I don't mean that:(

I'm from China, as you can see, my English is not good, so maybe there's some unintentional bad words in bad tone, don't mind:) In my place, this car haven't even release, and I'm waiting eagerly, cause I know it's a great one, I love it and have done many research about it, but never have my hand on:(

From my experience, the camber judged from bear eyes is very inaccurate, you may have an iphone lean again your wheel with a protractor app to get a rough number.

And stance and performance can not be both achieved with just camber adjust kit and coilovers if you going too low, you need roll center adjust kit to lower the ball joint of the lower control arm too, to raise the roll center. And in case of front wheels, that's better done with tie rod adjust kit too, or you will get crazy bumper steer.

Anyway, the suspension of FRS is very similar to WRX's, so basically I think there's not too much unknown mystery left, all we need to do is to learn from antecessors' experiences. I found motoIQ's "The Ultimate Guide to Suspension and Handling" and "A Tech Look Under the Scion FR-S!" are really great, I've read them all thoroughly and learn a lot about this car:)

Again, I believe bringing your car up till getting a satisfied camber is a much better solution than camber bushings or adjustable control arms, you have more than 2 options, in fact:)

True. That is another option but I don't want my car riding that high.

McPherson don't have an upper arm. Just the lower and the strut. Double-A arms don't have camber change with compression unless they're unequal length a-arms.

Still wondering about multilink. Is it considered an unequal length type setup?

Nathan

That's not true. If two equal length a-arms are non-parallel you will have camber change with travel.

But yes, you could consider the multi-link setup "unequal length," the camber changes pretty significantly with bump after all and that is the problem people are running into (which is nothing new for Subaru owners since the 08+ impreza has the same stuff).

Anyway, the problem is that the rear gains quite a bit of camber with compression and the front does not. So the car needs very little static rear camber while the front needs a lot, and when you lower the car the opposite happens. So yes, you need an arm or bushing or something to take camber out of the rear, and then you need a camber plate/bolt/offset top and roll center adjuster for the front to add camber. Ideal numbers would need to be determined with a tire temp gauge but starting at -2f/-1.5r is a pretty safe bet for street car.

Yes equal length double-A won't get camber gain with compression, I think that's why normal mass production cars don't use that setup:D All we can see is unequal double A or McPherson in reality. I agree with @jamal, cause upper A arm has shorter motion radius than strut, so double-A setup has greater camber gain with compression.

I haven't had a fully understanding of multilink, it's too complicated and too many variants... But surely the rear setup of FRS can be considered as a double-A setup according to many experts' explanation.

If I remember correctly, multi-link is a doubla A including a trailing arm that influences the geometry as things move. So really a modified double A.

I hadn't thought of non-parallel equal length.

Camber gain with compression isn't a bad thing right? Do people like equal length double A just because it feels consistent (I.E., no camber change with compression)? If McPherson is good enough for the 911 it's obvious it can be tuned to be very, very good.

It was probably more just what they came up with to meet packaging and design requirements. The whole rear suspension is really low profile compared to the older Subaru rear strut setu[ so the rear floor is a lot flatter and wider. The old strut towers used to be up right behind the back seat at shoulder level (really long struts are good for rally), and now they are at floor level.

You could consider the rear suspension similar to an unequal length double a-arm because there is one upper a-arm and then a longer lca. Then in addition to the toe link there is a trailing link. I haven't really thought about it but I suppose this was for anti-squat or something. Here are some pretty good articles about the rear suspension:
http://www.iwsti.com/forums/gr-suspe...-i-travel.html
http://www.iwsti.com/forums/gr-suspe...bumpsteer.html

You definitely want camber gain with compression to compensate for body roll and tire flex in a corner. Like I said, the rear does a much better job than the front. The front suspension will only gain about half a degree from stock ride height and then go back to where it was at full bump. Essentially this means that for every degree of roll you need a degree of camber to keep the front tires happy and optimize grip, except that you need to be able to brake and want the tires to wear evenly. A stock car probably rolls around 5-6 degrees under max cornering.

So for a McPherson to work well you basically need a lot of caster and camber and a big swaybar.

^ @jamal, thanks for that article. It's a good read and it seems to suggest dropping on coilovers and also that dropping negatively changes stock-dynamic camber/toe... so don't drop if wanting to maintain dynamic alignment / do a minimal drop?