I need more rear toe in, looking for ideas

[Turbo Smurf]

Here is my relevant info for this post:
-'95 TSi AWD, manual trans.
-Tokico Illumina spring/shock kit. Drop is ~2inches.
-All suspension bushings replaced with Prothane, so no seized joints (anymore).
-17x7" wheels, 40mm offset. 225/45R17 tires.

I just got a 4 wheel alignment and we were able to zero the toe on the front suspension and get the front/rear cambers in good form. However, even with new rear toe adjustment eccentric bolts, we were not able to get the rear wheels within spec. Not enough adjustment.

From memory, my specs were:
front camber ~-1.3 deg (both sides), zero toe.
rear camber ~-1.7 deg rear (both sides), -.81 toe each side (negative means toe out). This is around 7/16" total toe out, which is not good.

So how to fix this?
1.) If I increase the rear camber (more negative), it looks like toe would improve (less out). I can easily do this by removing washers from the UCA, but I like the camber where it is and would prefer not to increase it.
2.) It looks like increasing the rear ride height would give me less negative toe. I could do this by adding a shim under the strut or in the strut, above the spring. Shimming above the strut would require me to knock out the studs in the top of the strut and weld in longer bolts. Shimming in the strut would cause me to lose some suspension travel in extension.
3.) Lengthening the rear toe control arm or getting an adjustable control arm would be ideal. Anyone know if someone makes one? Something with HEIM joints and a built-in adjustment would be great. I have looked around and have only found the 1G kits from Taboo where you hack up the stock piece.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

[ldstang50]

There are adjustable control arms out there I just dont' know who makes them.
Just for shits and giggles try and adjustable sway bar. They are more meant for tightening up the suspension and limiting body roll, but that might be able to help.

 

[jtmcinder]

If a 2G with a 2" drop can't be aligned to zero rear toe, then the toe-arm bolts must be rust-welded (or some similar problem, which, I suppose, must include that the person doing the alignment is an idiot).

The toe arm and the lower lateral arm contact the knuckle at about the same height, so playing camber games will not solve your problem.

- Jtoby

 

[Turbo Smurf]

ldstang50 - I wish you could remember who makes the adjustable control arms - that's what I would like to get my hand on.

As far as using an adjustable anti-sway bar, I am not sure how that could affect my toe. With the stock end links, the sway bars cannot impart any lateral load on the knuckle and therefore cannot affect toe. The whole purpose of an anti-sway bar is to equilize vertical deflection between the coupled wheels without loading either horizontally. Maybe you could describe where you were going with that thought in more detail, because I just don't see it.

jtmcinder - Maybe it is more than 2 inches? It's an out-of-the-box Tokico Illumina kit for a 2g AWD. I know other people run them and I have heard that it is around 2 inches. Maybe my car takes a lower set?!?! The car is quite low - perhaps 4" between the ground and the rear diff, maybe less.

Either way, I mentioned the toe adjustment bolts are not rust-welded, in fact they are brand new. When we turned them, we watched the toe change on the alignment computer's screen. We were able to get the left side down to -.53 from -1.10 or so, but the right side only came down to -.83 from -1.25 or so. So, we brought the left side back out to -0.82 so they would be the same. The adjustment works, there is just not enough of it.

Please don't flame my alignment guy, he has been setting up track only Porsche, Ferrari, and Lotus cars in my area for years and they recommend him, so he must be doing something right. If anything is wrong with the suspension, it is because I took it all apart, cleaned and painted everything, and put it back together with new bushings and bolts. Maybe I messed something up, but I doubt it.

I have to disagree about the toe and lateral control arms contacting the knuckle at the same place. As soon as I finish this note, I will upload a picture of my rear suspension. You can clearly see that the toe control arm contacts the knuckle at about the same height as the half-shaft. The lateral control arm is directly below the half-shaft. If I had to guess, I would say they are separated by about 3-4 inches, height-wise.

 

[jtmcinder]

Apologies. Given all the "can I put 18s on my ride?" posts, I've gotten into a bad habit of skimming and made some assumptions.

I have a 2G and I've had the car much lower than a 2" drop and I'm surprised to hear of your problem, since I had no problem getting back to zero. One thing to try is to loosen the toe-bolt again and really push in on the front half of the tire while wiggling the bolt in circles. Sometimes the cam jumps, but I've not seen both sides jump at the same time, so this is doubtful.

Of course raising the car will work, since we toe-out in the rear under compression (up to a point, at least, but the flat zone is below a 2" drop), and this can be done by shimming the springs or the upper mount, as you suggest. But that's not optimal.

I would not add more rear camber, both because it won't help very much (even if the offset of the two laterals are more than I remember) and you already have more rear camber than front, so you'd just be adding more understeer.

Have you replaced any bushings? How are your trailing links? Did you do something weird like shim one end of the upper control arm's bracket more than the other arm?

- Jtoby

 

[Turbo Smurf]

No problem. Yeah, I am wondering why I am having so much trouble with this suspension set-up when I know people have gone lower.

The cams are still seated - I mean everything looks great, so that's why I am scratching my head.

Almost all the bushings are new. The only ones I did not replace are the ones in the struts themselves (all 4, front and rear) and the ones in the lateral link on the front, where the strut wishbone thingy bolts to it. No links look like they are bent if that is where you are going with this. The car was in great shape when I got it, drove straight and had several thousand miles on new tires. Wear on the used tires looked normal, so I doubt there were any problems. I only put 500 miles on the car before I took it apart and I did not damage any of the links in doing so.

As far as I can tell, my shims are the same height. It's quite a stack of washers, 5 normal and 3 thin per bolt. I tried to spread the different thickness washers around so that all the stacks were the same height. I didn't measure the stacks, but I know they are all less than 1/2mm different. If something were really amuck with my shim stacks, my caster would be out of wack, but I am well within specs there.

Any other ideas?

 

[ldstang50]

i was off thinking about something else. the sway bar is irrelevant here. my fault. still looking for the adjustable control arms.
I know Apex'i made some for the 3rd gen rx7. That doesn't guarentee there were some made for 2gs. But I thought I remember seeing some out there, I'll keep looking

 

[9guy9]

Is it possible to grind out the holes the cam bolts mount in so that you could slide the bolts holding the toe arm out? To do this you would have to pull the cams out, and if needed replace them with some washers. Without looking at my car I don't know if this is possible on our cars. This is the factory recomended method for several other cars front camber and caster adjustment. If I get a chance I will go look at my car and see how possible this would be.

 

[jtmcinder]

OK, time to insult you again.

When you look at your toe arms from behind the car, you're looking at a gold-colored disk with notches, right? I mean, you didn't put the arms and/or cams on the wrong sides, right?

See what I mean about being insulting? But I'm really stumped.

- Jtoby

 

[Turbo Smurf]

9guy9 - That is another possible solution, but I would rather not hack up my subframe. If it comes down to hacking parts, I will wack the toe control arm into two pieces and fab up some more adjustment. Thanks for the thought, though.

jtmcinder - My bolts are exactly as you describe them, notches on the outside so they are visible. I don't really know how it could be assembled improperly. The bolts can't be inserted from the front, there is not enough room to get them in there. The eccentric washer on the bolt is welded to it, so you can't muck that up. The only things you could possibly do are forget the loose eccentric washer or install it backwards. If you forgot it entirely, you would probably not be able to adjust toe at all. It wouldn't matter if you installed it backwards. Regardless, none of these possible problems apply to me - you can see notches on both side of the arm, on both the left and right. Again, I am able to adjust toe, just not enough.

By the way, I looked at my alignment sheet again. My front camber is a little bit more than my rear and everything is perfectly in spec except for rear toe, -.81deg left, -.83deg right. Spec is 0.00 to +0.24, I think.

 

[ACM]

>As far as I can tell, my shims are the same height. It's quite a stack of washers, 5 normal and 3 thin per bolt.

Can you translate that to an inch or metric dimension please ?
That sounds like an awful lot of washers just to get to -1.7*

If you space the top out too far that would give you a toe-out condition, but whilst the washer stack sounds plausible culprit the end result camber does not indicate this.

Still sounds odd though.

JT - you've spacered your rear camber, what thickness did you use ? I had 2 GM alignment shims behind each bolt on my cars. Dunno what thickness they were though.


Charles

 

[jtmcinder]

I currently have 5/8" of spacers and have no problem getting the tad of rear toe-in that I'm now liking.

- Jtoby

 

[Turbo Smurf]

I measured the washers and the "normal" ones were 3/32" and the thin ones were 3/64". If my math serves me, that comes out to about 0.61" per washer stack (5/8"=0.625"). This does not seem excessive to me. Your thoughts?

 

[jtmcinder]

While it doesn't come close to solving the problem, it's useful info. You see, we have the same car, the same amount of spacers, the same amount of lowering, and the same rear camber. In other words, this goes far to convince me that something very weird is going on, since everything else checks out fine.

When you replaced the cams on the toe arms and/or the bushings back there, did you get new toe arms or just swap in some new parts?

- Jtoby

 

[Turbo Smurf]

The toe arms are original - 83,000 Michigan road units. The bushings are brand new poly and the bolts/washers/nuts are brand new OEM. I guess the arms could be bent, there are serious potholes in the roads here. Maybe I will take a snap shot of each side tonight, post them in my gallery, and you can look at them. Maybe you will see something obvious that I just can't see.

 

[jtmcinder]

The odds of both toe arms being bent in the same way is just about zero. I was actually thinking that - maybe - you replaced the toe arms with the wrong parts.

(You see, when I can't figure something out, I get grumpy, and when I get grumpy, I get bitchy, and when I get bitchy, I often assume that everyone else is an idiot.)

My new suggestion is to do some serious measuring. Compare everything that you can get to on your car to another 2G, preferably with the two cars next to each other so you can be sure that you are comparing apples to apples. One of these days the guy who owns a certain white 2G is going to catch me measuring stuff on his car in the parking deck here at work and probably will be less than amused.

- Jtoby

 

[Turbo Smurf]

My thoughts exactly. I added some pictures to my gallery of both toe control arms, maybe you could take a look? If all goes well I will be heading to the Shootout this weekend and will have a good opportunity to poke around some other 2gs. I would have to measure mine first because it is too low to get in there when the wheels are on the ground.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the pictures. Maybe something will jump out at you...

 

[Turbo Smurf]

Well, after a few weeks of hard tire wear and awful handling we were finally able to fix the problem. With the Prothane bushing kit, there is a metal spacer for the inboard bushing of the rear toe control arm. This bushing goes in front of the control arm on each side, but I had installed them behind the arms. The spacer will install fine either way and there were no other indications of a problem other than when we went to align the car. Well, that and that toe out was so bad you could look at the rear wheels and see it.

Although, this helped on my car, it was still not enough to get proper alignment. We took the toe control arms back out and bent them in a cold press. We straightened each arm a little to increase its length. After a few trials, it was perfect and so is driving the car - like butter! Thanks to everyone who shared my head scratching on this one.

 

[jtmcinder]

Thanks for posting the update. - Jtoby

 

[cali]

sorry to bring this back to life but i've been searching but cannot find any info if anybody makes a rear adjustable toe control arm (95 gsx). im having a really hard time getting the toe set to 0. (already installed an ingalls rear camber kit)

thanks in advance to any help!

 

[Turbo Smurf]

I haven't looked for any since I had this issue, but at the time I was also unable to find adjustable arms. As I mentioned a few posts back, you may need to remove the arms and straighten them a little to lengthen them (if you have too much toe out). If I had to do it all over again, I would probably just make my own adjustable ones - they aren't very complicated.

 

[cali]

yea...that's exactly my problem...too much toe out in the rear. one alignment shop told me to try rearranging the spacers on the camber kit; putting more on the rear bracket than the front (at this point i have 6 in the back, two in the front, which is getting ridiculous)

i think it made things worse; i need to compare the numbers to the alignment i had done first.
what they wound up doing was adjusting the camber bolts on the brackets as well; one being all the way in and the other all the way out. this made the toe out better but still not at 0 and brought my camber back in to -1.5. (i had -.6 when i got there)

i'm clueless when it comes to adjustable arms of any kind....could you point me in the right direction?

 

[psycho]

I got your PM but I'll just answer it here. I wish there was a place to buy these but my rear toe arms where custom made. If you read the thread by GreenGoblin here in the suspension forums, he lays out what you need to buy to make your own.

Here you go

http://www.dsmtuners.com/forums/handling-tech/320763-spherical-bearings-2g-2.html#post152122187

 

[cali]

ah! great! thanks for the link!