Out of whack wheels

[Smiler.]

Driving on the M25 this afternoon, I saw an Opel Corsage, the rear wheels of which were towed in (correct term?) by a fair amount - I'd say 25 degrees from vertical.

The front wheel position looked normal.

Would a setup like this have a detrimental effect on handling (other than barging into adjacent lanes of traffic & tailgating)?

It may well be totally sound, but it looked dreadful.

[Repent]

Definitely. Not that most owners will pick it up. It's not going to be any good for braking balance either.

See plenty of old Peugeot/Citroens leering around too where the stub pin bearings are on the way out. Makes them look hilarious as they teeter through roundabouts.

[morgrp]

Don't you mean camber rather than toe?

[Superhoop]

It's the new 'Driftor' look also normally seen with stretched tyres, most often seen on Japanese hatches

There is a Civic type R that I see most mornings with about 15 degrees of camber at the rear - it looks ridiculous.

[Smiler.]

morgrp said:

Don't you mean camber rather than toe?

Yes, probably.

[AW111]

This is common on many types of independant suspension when the owner just fits shorter "lowering" springs and doesn't do any other mods to the suspension.

It just screams "cheap and nasty" to me, or maybe "cheap and ignorant".

[Mr2Mike]

doogz said:

I thought they used a torsion beam on the rear. Not sure how you add camber to that set up?

Tapered spacers between the hubs and axle are the usual way (assuming hubs are bolted on). Or just washers on the lower mounting points for real barry boys.

Might be a bent axle I suppose.

[Honestherbert]

You mean it had negative camber? if so it's probably because it either had a lot of weight in it or the owner has lowered it and not adjusted the camber to compensate.

[AW111]

doogz said:

...
I've seen peugeot rear torsion bar axles bent with a big vice, a press, a hammer, and a blowtorch

There was an interview with one of the Swedish SAAB legends (Carlsson?) where he described going "yumping" in the forest with several beefy mates in the back to bend some camber into the rear beam.
Octane mag iirc.

[Honestherbert]

And corsa's don't have torsion bars. Mainly a peugeot/renault thing iirc

[Mr2Mike]

doogz said:

That sounds awful.

It is awful, but barry doesn't worry his little head about the bolt heads not being parallel to the surface being clamped etc. You can even buy universal plastic spacers to do the job.

Apparently cutting and shutting the rear beam is also a common mod to get more camber

[lufbramatt]

doogz said:

Mr2Mike said:

It is awful, but barry doesn't worry his little head about the bolt heads not being parallel to the surface being clamped etc. You can even buy universal plastic spacers to do the job.

Apparently cutting and shutting the rear beam is also a common mod to get more camber

What?

"By holding the outer edges of the wheel and rocking it from side to side, the tiniest amounts of play can be felt. Adjust nut to give a tiny amount of play."



The rear hub nut should be tightened til the wheel/hub is almost done up properly, but not quite?!

A cut and shut sounds like a better solution to me, if the guy doing the welding knows what he's doing.

I've modified cars in the past. Some probably tacky mods, colour coding interior door handles, a set of blue-ish side lights.

But plastic compressible shims to make the car handle worse, and not quite tightening the hub nut up properly on purpose. The mind boggles.

Errrm . . . The rear hub nut on a mk2 golf sets the preload on the rear wheel bearings. It is meant to be set up with a tiny amount of play (the cover washer under the nut should be able to be moved with the end of a screwdriver) to compensate for expansion of the races as they warm up. The nut is then locked in place with a castellated cover and a split pin to keep it from undoing. Too tight and the bearings fail very quickly.

[AW111]

That hub nut stuff seems pretty reasonable - it is setting up the load on the wheel bearings.

I normally nip it up until it just starts to grab, then back one flat. Not on one of those, or with a camber kit, but front wheel bearings on rwd cars, and trailer wheel bearings.

I'm not impressed with the plastic camber kit, but if the shims were brass, with a matching washer / shim for the bolt heads, I'd think it ok.

ETA Plastic may be ok, I would just be concerned about long-term creep or brittleness.

Edited by AW111 on Tuesday 6th August 10:47

[lufbramatt]

doogz said:

lufbramatt said:

Errrm . . . The rear hub nut on a mk2 golf sets the preload on the rear wheel bearings. It is meant to be set up with a tiny amount of play (the cover washer under the nut should be able to be moved with the end of a screwdriver) to compensate for expansion of the races as they warm up. Too tight and the bearings fail very quickly.

Thanks, I was really hoping there was a good reason for it!

No worries, you don't set them up with any movement as such, just the tiniest detectable amount of play. It's hard to describe and sounds wrong but when the bearings are hot (the bearings are pressed into the brake disc so get a fair amount of heat soak) all the play gets taken up. If they are done up so there's no movement when cold they overheat and can seize.

Those spacers on that thread are being used to add a degree or so of rear toe/camber to tune the handling of a track car. Not add 10 degrees of camber to a "stanced" car. That procedure does actually appear in VW workshop manuals to correct slightly distorted rear beams as no other adjustment is available without replacing the beam.

[aka_kerrly]

lufbramatt said:

Errrm . . . The rear hub nut on a mk2 golf sets the preload on the rear wheel bearings. It is meant to be set up with a tiny amount of play (the cover washer under the nut should be able to be moved with the end of a screwdriver) to compensate for expansion of the races as they warm up. The nut is then locked in place with a castellated cover and a split pin to keep it from undoing. Too tight and the bearings fail very quickly.

I'm glad someone knows what they are on about.

On the subject or rear camber and geometry settings yet again it amazes me that people are prepared to ridicule those who have adjusted beyond factory settings.

It's another of those classic threads where someone with a Westfield could start a thread telling us all about the elongated bolts and tiny slices if steel they have used to dial in -2* negative camber they would be treated like a god, the same set up on a FWD hatch and it's deemed Barry.

[lufbramatt]

I'd agree I wouldn't want those plastic shims on my (road) car either. But the car in that thread is a dedicated track car, it's quite an impressive project actually, he's done loads of testing and improvement with lots of photo/video/telemetry analysis so if it didn't help it wouldn't be on there. A big part of his testing was finding the best suspension geometry- but this is a track car and probably doesn't translate to ideal for a road car.

[aka_kerrly]

doogz said:

I'm not ridiculing those that have adjusted beyond factory limits.

I'm doubting the need for 2.5 degrees of rear camber on a Golf, how much is he running on the front? And I'm pointing out that I'm not overly taken with the method by which he's achieving this. Plastic has a youngs modulus of around 1/100th of steel, meaning that as it's loaded up and unloaded, it'll compress and release. Just doesn't seem that clever to me, will introduce fatigue into the bolts, and higher grade bolts, like replacing the 8.8s (assuming that's what they were) with 12.9s does nothing for fatigue resistance.

I understand your point regarding fatigue and the the use of higher tensile bolts but rest assured I believe that track car has in development for a good few years now.

I'm quite sure that if those plastic rings were going to fail they would have done so on one of the hundreds of laps around the Ring/Spa/ UK circuits that this particular mk2 has been on.

thread here - http://www.clubgti.com/showthread.php?126104-MK2

[Chicane-UK]

Referring to the camber shims on the MK2 Golf on the previous page - speaking from my own experience with my Corrado where either the rear beam or the stub axles seem to bend slightly with age / mileage causing additional negative rear camber to occur, I was lead to believe that the shims were made available primarily to get RID of the negative camber, rather than create it.