Racer X Aluminum Front Lower Control Arm

[chezzy79]

I'm considering purchasing this front LCA from Racer X, but before I take the plunge, I wanted to ask about its durability.

Compared to OEM or their full-chromoly FLCA, it looks really flimsy, especially the castor arm. I'm wondering if anybody had any experience running them, or heard any stories about them? Any help is greatly appreciated!

[H1C]

I've had these for a little less than a year, and have used them for daily driving and quite a bit of autocross. You don't have to worry about durability -- the caster arms are chromoly. If anything, I'm a little concerned about the arms being too much stronger than the stamped steel OEM pieces, and not giving way in the event of a side impact or jumping a curb, and transmitting damage to the frame instead.

As one of the first users of these arms, some points of advice:

1) Have Racer-X install the ball joints on these arms for you. Or make 100% certain that the shop you use has a shop press and can deal with the angled ball joint cups. The first shop I took my LCAs to, a long-established local track-car shop, destroyed them trying to use a ball joint press. (I'm the reason there's that disclaimer on the product page about taking the arms to a shop with proper equipment. To Racer-X's extreme credit, they did a huge solid by me and replaced my LCAs free of charge when the shop would not take responsibility for their install error. Jeff and everyone at Racer-X are really stand-up individuals and go above and beyond to do right by their customers -- I can't speak highly enough of them.)

2) Use blue loctite on the jam nuts when you get an alignment. Otherwise they will work free and start rattling, and your alignment settings will drift out of spec.

3) Depending on how much camber you need, you may need to get extended tie rod ends to compensate for toe. If you need a lot of camber, you will run out of thread on the OEM tie rod ends. I wanted quite a bit of camber (-3 or a bit more), so wound up getting Racer-X's also very nice extended tie rod ends.

4) Consider getting the rod ends over the urethane bushings if you really need easy align-ability. With the bushings, there's more binding and resistance, such that the caster and camber are not as independently adjustable as they would be with rod ends/heim/rose joints. I have the bushings, and if I could do it over, I'd take the rod ends for ease of alignment. With the bushings, alignments are somewhat painstaking and time consuming, as adjusting one setting affects the others, and requires a really skilled and patient alignment tech, whom I found luckily.

Feel free to ask if you have other questions about these LCAs, and I'll do my best to answer.

[endless_pain]

I've used mine for two hard racing seasons (2-3 weekends a month) and they are still going strong. The only 'negative' I can speak of is that the chromoly arm is hard to adjust by hand. They should machine an area where a wrench can be used.


But like H1C mentioned, their customer service is one of the best.

[Traktor]

I just installed these on my BRZ and ran into an issue. I have Whiteline swaybars installed and at full droop they interfere with the alloy camber arm unless I have the arm at a minimum length from the subframe. The problem is that this length has a lot of camber (around -3) and my toe is ridiculously out. I tried loosening the lock nut on the tie rod end to bring it back in, but can't for the life of me get it undone.
I already have white line camber bolts, so only needed another degree or so of camber.
I am not looking forward to the drive to the shop tomorrow. I am hoping that there is enough thread on the factory tie rod to compensate!

[H1C]

I think it would be safer to remove the front swaybar and adjust the camber arms so the toe is ballpark correct, than to try to drive with extreme toe-out.

If you don't want that much camber, and want your swaybar to clear the arm at full droop, there are a couple of things you can do:

1) Shorten the caster arms as much as possible. This will pull the camber arm toward the front of the car, away from the swaybar. From experience, this will net you around 7.5 deg of caster. This will result in very strong self-centering in the steering and a lot of dynamic camber the more you turn the steering into a corner. This can feel odd to some people and takes some getting used to; you'll learn to drive with smaller, smoother steering inputs. But even at this caster setting, you will probably still need a lot of camber for the swaybar to clear the camber arm.

2) Get much shorter end links. This is probably your only solution if you want to run only 2 degrees or so of camber with these LCAs.

I want to run over 3 degrees of camber, so was able to keep the stock end links on my TRD front bar. I need to run a minimum of 6 degrees of caster, though, and the bar just barely clears the camber arm at full droop.

Good luck!

[Traktor]

I ended up getting the tie rod locknuts free and eyeballed the toe. There seems to be a bit of thread left on the tie rod, although I already have -2 degrees camber from the Whiteline bolts.
I also adjusted the castor arm as far forward as the urethane bush would allow.
It drove ok to the alignment shop with a slightly off centre wheel.



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[H1C]

Glad the drive to the shop worked out safely for you.

I just re-read your posts and realized that you're looking for another degree of camber in addition to the 2 degrees that you get from the Whiteline camber bolts.

I'm using the OEM camber bolts, which got me, if I remember correctly, around 1.5 degrees. I'm at -3.2 now, and my swaybar barely clears the LCA with OEM end links, so the OEM camber bolts could be an option for you if you want to keep the end links that you have now.