A few questions regarding camber and toe
 

Hey guys,

Still a bit of an amateur in the suspension business so bare with me.

I tried searching about this but couldn't find the exact answers to my questions. I have two sets of wheels (Volk CE28N's and OZ Ultraleggera) I switch between them sometimes whenever I'm bored of a set. So, other than the usual alignments I make for every switch, I decided to talk to my wheel/tire shop expert about camber and toe.

I wanted to go a bit more with rear camber and he mentioned something about buying toe links and LCAs because the rear camber can't be fiddled with/adjusted at ALL. Is this true?

He also mentioned that fiddling with camber would also mess with the toe in/out and I know that and that also needs toe links so that the toe can be adjusted. Is this true?


So, the main question is, for the fronts and rears, NOTHING can be done to alter the camber/toe on stock links and LCAs?, not even a litttttle bit?

You don't need an alignment when switching wheels unless they don't fit otherwise.

Toe can be adjusted stock. Camber in the front just requires camber bolts. Rear needs bushings or LCA's.

Not sure about which adjustments affect others.

Well that's what I thought at first but it turned out the steering wheel would just slowly go to the right or left meaning that a tie rod alignment is in need.

Yeah the camber crash bolts, I'll order them now.

As for the rear, I get rear LCA bushings and I can adjust camber? is that what you mean?

Either you're rough when installing your wheels or it's in your head...maybe much wider tires causing tambling ....( different offset wheels maybe)


Go to rallysportdirect .com

You can either change out the LCAs or buy the white line bushings.

You only need the lower control arm :)

There's a big difference in the offsets yes.

Thank you CSG Mike, PM'd yah.

If you adjust camber with an adjustable LCA you WILL have to adjust toe, how much camber you're changing will dictate if you need toe links with more adjustment than stock or not.

If you get an adjustable UCA you won't have to change the toe setting when you adjust camber, but they're more expensive than LCAs.

Front toe adjustment is done equally to each tie rod otherwise the steering wheel will be off center. The steering wheel won't go slowly off center it will be at a particular point off center resulting from unequal changes to tie rod length. Front toe always equalizes by moving the steering rack to split toe left to right so all toe adjustments must be equal at the front.

Unequal camber on the same axle will cause the steering wheel to go off center in order to drive straight and this will change with speed.

Rear toe is set separately left and right, if adjustable which I suspect it is. However, unless you are compensating for some other alignment defect or for some odd reason want the car to handle differently left to right (NASCAR style) rear toe should be the same each side.

Offset or wheel or tire width has no effect on suspension settings but, in extreme cases may benefit from suspension changes.

There is no need to go wide enough or far enough from factory offset to require alignment settings to be changed from stock.

If you track or Autocross competitively against others then by all means try suspension adjustments otherwise there is no point departing from Subaru's carefully engineered settings. If you are timing only your own improvements why confuse the issue by "improving" the car also? This car is slow, don't spend any money trying to make it fast, unless you hang a supercharger on the engine, then maybe it needs more grip.

In other words, getting LCAs and toe links would solve all of the issues I could possibly have with camber.

I have tried only once to change between the sets and that's when I first got my Volks and had to do a tie rod alignment since the steering wheel just didn't feel right and the car wasn't driving straight if I kept my hands off the steering wheel for a few seconds. Never tried to switch between the sets again but I heard from a few guys that if I'm going back to my old set-up then another alignment is in need because of the different offsets, different width of the wheel and I didn't buy that but since I'm a newbie to suspension geometry, might as well just learn the hard way and that's to try it myself and so I decided to ask for playing around with the camber and toe for two reasons and they would be:
1- To learn
2- to give the car the amount of camber I need for track and for just normal daily driving/shows.

Looks like what they have said is wrong and I will try to switch between the sets this week and tell you how it goes. But, to get this over with I would need to buy whiteline bushings, front crash bolts and toe links to solve all of the issues I would encounter with achieving a bit of camber for a little bit of track/drift and for DD/show.

Using different offset from factory will present problems. Rwd cars tend not to be as sensitive to offset changes as the drive wheels are locked in a straight ahead position. Fwd and even awd cars do not like offset changes.

Changing the offset doesn't just load up wheel bearings differently it changes the center of rotation of the steered wheels, and the center of thrust for the driven wheels. This means the center of the contact patch moves away from the designed location. Most likely this is a bad idea.

Moving away from factory offset is almost always a bad idea unless you are fitting wider wheels and must change offset for them to fit (a very good reason not to fit wider wheels). The wider wheel with the same offset may cause interference with suspension. However, using less offset moves the center of rotation and thrust outboard. The duel symptoms are twitchy steering and twitchy handling under wheelspin conditions.

Since the ideal wheel for this car is probably 18x8 which fits with no offset changes why fit anything wider?

You are absolutely right and my OZ wheels which used to be on the car before I got the new ce28n's are 18x8, these are 18x9.5, I'm not sure why but I think it's because of the width, I always hated seeing a tire not wide from the back and the volks really give it that meaty and fat tire look, so the answer to your question would be for looks.

Changing offset to fit wider wheels and tires is a bad thing? Where do you get 18x8 being the ideal wheel size? The only reason to go up in rim size on this car is for the fitment of bigger brakes, something not needed in a car this light and at these power levels.

Edit: Did some reading about offsets and your points are valid. It is something that seems to trouble FWD cars more. The lower offsets put more stress on the bearings, and knuckles.