How to adjust camber?

[BlackFox5.0]

I need to adjust the camber on my g/f's '94, which I just put '97 spindles on with some PBR brakes.

The camber is way off, I put it on the alignment machine at work (never did an alignment myself before, but I helped out doing them) I got the Toe pretty much all set, but the camber was reading way off, and you can visually see that....I didn't know how to use the camber function on the machine, and didn't know how to change it on the car, plus I had to hurry up as I didn't want to get in trouble...

So with the stock caster camber plates, how do I adjust the camber?

 

[GTPhreak]

camber is the adjustment toward/away from the motor (left/right when facing the engine from the front). when you change the camber, the toe will change so you will also need to reset that

 

[BlackFox5.0]

I know, but I want to move the camber so it isn't as negative as it is now so we can wait a few days till my father can give it an alignment.....she still has to drive to and from work, well I guess I can take it back to work, but how do I change the camber! I assume I have to drill out the rivets, do I loosen all the nuts on the plates and pull on it?

 

[VIPERn94Five-0]

I know, but I want to move the camber so it isn't as negative as it is now so we can wait a few days till my father can give it an alignment.....she still has to drive to and from work, well I guess I can take it back to work, but how do I change the camber! I assume I have to drill out the rivets, do I loosen all the nuts on the plates and pull on it?

your prolly gonna want to get some good Caster/Camber plates like the Maximum Motorsports ones....that will make it much easier.....




Anthony

 

[rockin_rick]

I assume I have to drill out the rivets, do I loosen all the nuts on the plates and pull on it?

Yes. The sevice manual specifies -1.35° to +.15° with nominal being -.60°. Torque the 2 nuts/1 bolt to 45-59 lb-ft.

Camber is also adjustable at the spindle to strut conncetion. When I bolted the struts on, I wedged a large screwdriver in the top, rotating to more positive. It seemed that without doing that, it would rotate to more negative. After getting an alignment set to -1°, the bolts were pretty much in the middle of their travel. I have stock 94 spindles.

Rick

 

[BlackFox5.0]

For the strut bolts, do you mean you loosened the top bolt, and pulled on it so it would pivot on the bottom strut bolt?

This car has some serious negative camber, I forget what it was when I had it on the alignement machine. It doesn't look like just adjusting the camber plates will help....

 

[rockin_rick]

You need to loosen BOTH of them just enough so you can 'rock' (relative term!) the spindle within the strut. By only doing one, you only get half of the movement. I don't think that you could move it with the bottom bolt holding, though. I used a large regular screwdriver to hold the spindle in a position of most possible positive camber, then tightened the bolts down.

The pic is just a quick drawing that I whipped up to explain this. The red circles are the holes in the strut. The yellow circles are the bolts. The green lines represent the spindle. Of course, these dimensions are exagerated for the point. The adjustment takes advantage of the difference in size between the strut hole size, the smaller bolt size, and the spindle hole size.

I also cleaned all the rust out of the holes in the spindle with a small sanding wheel on a dremel. Perhaps that allowed me more adjustment range.

Rick

 

[BlackFox5.0]

I know exactly what you mean, how much more camber would be expected of this?

I saw something similar to this on ebay, but it was like a cam bolt that replaced the top strut bolt.....

It didn't seem like there was much movement with those bolts in when I put everything back together, they seemed pretty damn tight in there...

 

[rockin_rick]

I seem to remember some play in there. Sanding out the rust did make a difference. If you don't have a dremel, you could just get the little sanding drum for the dremel and use it in a drill. It's about 1/2" in diamater. Sand out the strut holes, too. Use low speed to just get the rust. I'd GUESS that it would give at least 1° - 2° of adjustment. This is just going by how it felt when I wedged the screwdriver in, never actually tested...

What condition are the strut bushings at the plate? When I did mine, some bonehead had switched the plate bushing with the bumpstop (before I bought the car). The bumpstop is softer/designed differently and doesn't support the strut correctly in the plate. This allowed the bumpstop to get distorted and provide sloppy support in the plate, and thus, alignment. It also happened that it gave more negative camber, since that's the way the strut wants to naturally move. It's easy to interchange the 2 rubber bushings, as they look very similar and will fit each others place. I didn't notice this until I removed the strut from the plate. Something else to consider...

Rick

 

[BlackFox5.0]

Theyare stock bushings, I just put these spindles on so there is no rust on them as I has a friend sandblast them for me....