I spent some time this afternoon playing with camber in the front end. My methodology was as follows:
1) measure camber using an angle cube stuck to a length of 3/4" square tube, while the car is on the ground, and write it down. There's some imprecision here because the length of tubing was too big to measure on the rim, so I had to use the tire sidewalls.
2) measure with a long level across the tops of the struts, with the angle cube on top. I measured 0.25* with passenger side lower.
3) lift car on QuickJack.
4) Measure camber with the car in the air, and write it down
5) check floor slope with the long level on top of my r/c droop blocks. Came up with 0.25* here, too.
6) add camber on the ground and the floor slope adjustment together, then subtract my target camber, to figure out the change I need. Then take the in-the-air measurement, and add the change, to get the in-the-air target value.
7) took the front wheels off
8) stuck the angle cube to the brake rotor, and confirmed the measurement there was close enough to what I got on the wheel/tire.
9) tilted the camber plates out as far I could without moving the holes the screws are in, which put them a bit inboard of centered in the hole. This gave me a range of about 2-4 degrees at the knuckle. I have factory 14mm bolts in both top and bottom holes.
10) Loosened the strut from the knuckle and adjusted to my target there.
Aaaand, that's where I stopped for the day. I'm sort of dreading toe adjustment, and finding out how far off my adjustments are. 🙈
While I was in there, I noticed there's more space between the ears on the strut and the top of the knuckle than I ever remember seeing on my STI across a few different strut setups.
I decided to measure it:
1.0155 - 0.9805 = 0.035, which is almost 1mm. That seems like a lot. The ears are almost 1/4" thick:
In order to clamp on the knuckle, the bolts are going to have to bend two 1/4" steel ears enough to close a nearly 1mm gap before actually clamping on the knuckle. I don't know how to run the numbers for whether that matters, but it certainly doesn't seem ideal. Tightening the bolts down to 120 ft lbs I could really feel something flexing. It felt a lot like bolt stretch, hitting maybe 60 ft-lbs pretty quickly, and then very slowly ramping up to 120 over a lot more additional rotation than felt comfortable.
I'm starting to wonder if it'd be worth trying to find / make some shims to put in there to fill the gap, and hopefully get more of that torque going into actual clamping.