Well, as of yesterday, the car is now officially an STX car. I headed to Sam's shop in Brookville, PA on Friday afternoon, and we worked into the night to get the initial setup done to the car.
We learned a lot about the car in a few hours, with the most important of those things being the likely solution to the uneven rear camber issue. Lots of people have been reporting their rear camber settings to be pretty different from side to side - in some cases, up to a full degree difference. However, when we went to put in the Whiteline rear subframe inserts, we noticed that the rear mounts in the subframe actually have an oblong hole through their bushings. This would mean that you could jimmy the subframe around, and it's own alignment could affect the alignment at the wheels. So we did what we could to ensure the subframe was bolted down as evenly as possible, and when we put the car on the alignment rack the next day, the rear camber was damn near spot on; -2.59 on one side, -2.60 on the other.
I would recommend to anyone having rear camber symmetry issues to install the Whiteline collars - if you're going to mess around with the subframe, you may as well put them in. They are very inexpensive, the install is easy, and they should make it easier to correctly locate the subframe's positioning.
http://www.stranoparts.com/partdetai...252&ModelID=37
The next day, we put the car on the rack and started playing with ride height and alignment. Another interesting note about the rear suspension is that it is VERY sensitive to ride height. Sam's personal FR-S has about -2.2 camber in the rear - my car is less than 10mm lower and measured at -2.6. With that kind of camber change, I think a big key to getting the handling of these cars right will be in the rear spring rate. We'll see.
The alignment was pretty much dictated by the non-adjustable rear camber, so we ended up going with a bit more camber up front than I wanted (-3.0) to free the car up. That was the absolute max we could run on the KWs with the Whiteline hats, and the absolute max I was willing to run on a daily driver.
So far the car is a lot more fun and a lot more responsive, we will see how it does at a test-and-tune in Columbus on 3/30. Hopefully before then I will also have a couple more things, like a tune and possibly an exhaust.
