Basic Noob Questions - Camber bolts/alignment/etc
 

Hi all,


I have what I feel to be a silly question, but since I know very little about suspension stuff, I'd rather ask then be sorry later.


I just bought a set of cheap coils, Tein Street Basis. I plan to drop the car more for aesthetics than for 'performance', however, I'm not slamming the car. I still need it to be a DD and survive the roads.


So I'm figuring like a 1.75in-2in drop, we will see when I put them on.


Currently on 17x9 + 35s w/ 255/40s.


My question(s) are as followed:


What are camber bolts? What are they used for? Are they necessary for the drop I'm looking at. I'm not looking to stance the car, I would prefer to have the least amount of camber.


Put the coils on, adjust to the height I want, raise it a bit, then hope it settles to where I need to?


How long after the coils should I get an alignment? 500 miles?


And if you guys have any other tips and/or recommendations to do, feel free to add them.


I'm not looking to do LCAs or end links/toe arms yet, as I don't plan to track the car and don't run it very hard.


Thanks!

1.75"-2" drop is not exactly mild drop. Imho it may require lot of other suspension changes/upgrades.

There's no way to adjust camber in the rear, and with how the rear (double wishbone) suspension works on these cars, you see more negative camber as the car is lowered. What this means is that if you don't do camber bushings or lower control arms, you're going to see unnecessary negative rear camber after a 2 inch drop.

Camber bolts are for the front, because the front is a MacPherson setup and will not gain really any camber upon lowering. There's also no way to adjust front camber from the factory, and camber bolts or crash bolts let you adjust it a little bit. The factory camber setting is close to 0, which is suboptimal. 0 camber is not good. You want a little bit of negative camber. Cars have to turn, and negative camber is important for grip during cornering.

Generally speaking, around -1 to -2 up front, with around -1 in the rear is about the right place to start when thinking about performance alignments on street cars. More aggressive driving situations will likely require even more negative camber. Anything more than -3 will start to wear tires unevenly. Generally speaking, more negative rear camber than negative front camber will lead to understeer.

You want to also be cognizant of toe changes, and lowering will likely affect toe. You don't really need any toe on these cars. You might need a little rear toe in, if you go forced induction later on just to keep things more stable at speed. Toe's also what wears tires the fastest.

For the drop you're aiming for, you should get rear lower control arms AND camber bolts.

Less than an inch is a mild drop, and will not necessarily require camber adjustment in the rear, unless if you're anal about it. You should still do camber bolts to keep things balanced, regardless. You're changing the suspension geometry when you lower the car, and you're going to have to correct it, unless if you're okay with it being worse or weirder than stock.

I'd get an alignment right away; if not on the same day, within the week. If you don't want to deal with lower control arms, then you might be better served starting at an inch of lowering and see if you like the way it performs at that height, and seeing how much negative camber you have in the rear vs. the front.

Or if you don't care about understeer, oversteer, or geometry; just slam it, zero out the toe as much as you can, and call it a day.

tl;dr version: there's no factory camber adjustment, and lowering will increase negative rear camber. Camber bolts and lower control arms can be used to bring the front and rear camber, respectively, to acceptable/optimal ranges. Get an alignment, ASAP.

Also, good reading:
http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67345

Appreciate it. Bit new to the whole suspension game. Never dabbled in it before. Do I make the adjustments to camber/etc? Or does a shop generally do that during alignment.

Typically, the aligned shop will do the adjustments for you.
@jawn pretty much nailed on the head . If you are planning to install the camber bolts yourself, just try to set them similarly side to side (just bottom them out/max negative camber), the shop can then even them out when you get your alignment.

So which bolts do I buy? After some reading, it appears the top bolt is a 16MM and the lower is a 14MM. If I'm trying to dial in camber in the front, which one should I buy? (or both?). Also, I'm just going to try and max out stock LCAs - for now. It's been done, I'll just have to figure out the drop required to do so.

@jawn damn that's a lot of text and a lot of good info.

About an inch should put you in at around -2 degrees of rear camber, which is the upper limit of what I would want since the camber bolts up front will max out at around -2 degrees. Ideally, I'd like more front camber than rear, but if you can't adjust it, you do what you can.

I'm also interested. I have the 16mm top bolts installed with max camber (maybe 1 degree) If i'm looking for any more should I have to invest in some new top hats or go with bottom bolts. Trying to run some 18x9.5 +34 without it hitting the stock struts on tein lowering springs.