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T77911S T77911S is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: MYR S.C.
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first, to make sure we are all clear on this. if the top of the wheel angles in towards the center of the car from perpendicular, that is negative camber. if you move the top of the strut in towards the center of the car, that is in a negative camber direction and if you move it out, that is in a positive direction.

lets go over how the suspension is suppose to work.
lets start with zero camber and stock ride height, going straight and just the wheel moving up and down.
as the wheel moves up, due to the angle of the lower control arm, negative camber is created by "pushing" the bottom of the wheel out. as the wheel moves down, the bottom of the wheel moves in creating positive camber.
draw a circle and then draw a line from the center to the outside at about a 7 oclock position. as that radius (lower control arm) moves up, the point at the end of the radius gets further away from a perpendicular line drawn down the center of the cricle, until a max distance is reached at the 9 oclock position. just for numbers sake, lets say we have 2 degrees negative camber at the 9 oclock position. anything past the 9 ocloack position starts to add positive camber, which is bad.
so as you lower the car, the lower control arm changes its angle. we started at the 7 oclock position and zero degrees and now we have lowered it to the 8 oclock position. if nothing is changed, now we are sitting at 1 degree negative camber.
this is where you are at and things get tricky.
if you reset the camber back to zero, you can only gain 1 degree of camber from 8 oclock to 9 oclock, but....now you have to start limiting the travel of the suspension because you dont want to go past the 9 oclock possition because you start to lose that negative camber. so now comes the Tbars and sway bars. if you leave it at 1 degree, you get the added 1 degree as was intended originally, but now you have to think about tire wear and perhaps a little loss is braking since the wheels are no longer flat on the ground. where oh where to compomise.

back to reality. as the guy above was trying to say, i think, is that as you lower the car, you reach a point where the top of the strut can no longer be moved out to obtain the stock settings for the original ride height, which you may not want to do anyway.

another thing that comes into play when lowering is the change in roll center. im not going into that because i cant explain it well enough here and there are a lot of good books that can.

i know i did not give a real answer, but hopefully you can now make one on your own, or at least under stand what is going on, unless you already did.

if there is a spec for euro height, i would use that, or, i would go with something between the stock camber setting and the camber at the new height,
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Old 03-27-2012, 05:45 AM
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