neg camber - pros?? cons??

[lilcrash]

i have a slight looseness in my front end, a few ppl have said to install a set of rca's . but this will give me negative camber. so what i want to know is -

is negative camber good or bad on a street car??
how will it alter how the car handles??
will it destroy my tyres quicker??

thank you

[The Real Roadrunner]

what do you mean by loosness ie what does the car do?

rca's dont give neg camber they just lower your balljoint hieght and depending on wher your lca was in its arc will determine which wether you increase or decrease camber but it only changes by less than 0.5deg in most cases.

more camber can give increased turn in , and let you drive faster through a given corner dependin on tyre choice but in saying that you can also have too much and this will give you the opposite affect because too little of the tyre is in contact with the road.
the right amount of camber for a certain car is mostly dependant on the tyre you use.

large amounts of static camber can destroy tyres quickly and has alot to do with toe settings as well.

my advice is take it to a susp specialist and get them to look at it, ( and i dont mean KMART Tyre and Auto)

hope that helps
cheers

[boyracer]

I agree wit The real roadrunner

Loosness ??? What you talkin bout Willace ??

To much negative camber will generate excessive heat on the inside edge on your tyre and you will destroy the tyes on the road in no time ... And it will decrease your braking ability because of the smaller cantact area..

Want better turn in .. screw in more + caster .. u'll need Popeye arms to turn the wheel at slow speeds .. but more + caster = free - camber mid corner..

[Norbie]

I cranked the camber up to 3 degrees on my MA61 a while back, turn-in and mid-corner grip was just freaky, but the tyres wore out very quickly on the inside edge; I had to throw them out with 80% tread on most of the tyre because they were down to the canvas on the inside. Fun but expensive, so I have 1.5 degrees now.

[jezza323]

i have -1.9 on my car with no uneven wear.....although my car doesnt spend a lotta time going in a straight line, tis no fun in a straight line

[rick q]

I've got 1 deg negative on mine (a clubman).

Can't comment on how it might help with the handling of your car. On the track the negative camber gives me even load across the full width of the tyre - however, because I also do lots of street miles, the inside edge of the tyres does wear heavily in "normal" use.

Because the tyres are directional, I have them swapped side to side on the car when they're a bit under half worn i.e. the right front tyre gets taken off the rim and put back in the same direction on the left front rim and vice versa. This makes the inside worn edge of the right front tyre now the outside edge of the left front tyre and evens the wear up.

Apparently it's often done - even on Commodes with their dodgy rear suspension which often come "standard" with negative camber.

[Hen]

I think this has been covered well by the above posts, but I just want to point out that it sounds like your "looseness" problem has nothing to do with camber. First check to see if any suspension or steering parts are loose or worn.

Camber is great, but does tend to wear tyres more during normal driving. Generally the more road km's you do the closer to zero camber you should run.

Hen

[celicapain]

neg camber positives- turn in/reduced understeer
negatives- increased wear,
increased castor positives- better turn in, higher mid corner grip
negatives-reduced straight line stability, wierd under brakes.
thats the ultraconcise dictionary of handling, you can write whole books on it if you want to

[Andrew162]

I'll drop this in because I believe it's relevant as well... some cars run stock with a negative camber setting. now I don't know if it's generally cars with IRS, but my RAV4 ran with -0.5* on the front and -2.0* on the rear... stock.

because of the car's stock height and boat-like handling characteristics, after dropping it 65mm all-round on a custom suspension setup (incl rear swaybar not found on LWB RAV4's), not only did the neg. camber kick out to about -4.0* but it also handled with the best of them. the wider tyres I had didn't suffer either (100% flat wear) not only because the treads were mostly flat across the tread face where most tyres would be more round, but also because the suspension components were doing their job and making the tyres grip the road harder and the more force was put onto each tread, the neg. camber dictated that the tyres with that load would have the full face of the tread on the road.

my 2c.

[RobertoX]

increased castor positives- better turn in, higher mid corner grip
negatives-reduced straight line stability, wierd under brakes.

Please explain?

[styler]

i think most of your questions have been covered above regarding looseness, rca's function, tyres, braking etc

also to note some cars do come out with positive camber from factory,
only about 1 deg or so, but if you change this to 0 or 1 deg static it will be good for a street car if you remember to switch the wearing edge around for increased tyre life.

and if you lower your car which has mac struts i think it gives a slight bit of neg camber eg 1 inch = 1/4deg, 2 inch = 1/2 deg or something like that, someone correct me if this is wrong, its not a lot but still exists.

what you might want to consider is dynamic camber like boyracer says which is induced from the caster angle when cornering (turning), as opposed to static camber which is there all the time in straights and corners. i think camber is most useful in corners so it makes sense to use dynamic and a slight static if needed for an extra total amount, then you get good tyre life, steering grip and braking contact area.

the main problem with static camber is that its hard to get the right combination of parts to end up at the static camber setting you want,
you can try camber plates but sometimes theres not enough movement without changing the strut/spring or modding the strut tower, or try other cars lower control arms which sometimes need to be modded but are a set non adjustable length with balljoint issues on occasion, camber bolts which have many problems themselves, rose jointed lower control arms which are illegal afaik other than track use. so its a mix of parts that hopefully gets the right number in the end.

thats why people sometimes have camber/caster plates is to correct the other components slightly to the right setting that they want in the end or to change camber quickly and easily to suit various driving styles.

i mean its the same with all car performance, the more extreme you go in its driving catagory will usually compromise all the other catagories the same amount, daily/street/track/drag etc, so its always a compromise, less mods for less performance for more drivability, more mods for more performance for less drivability.

theres camber and caster as mentioned.... then you get toe in/out, kingpin angle (aka steering inclination angle SAI), kingpin offset (aka scrub radius), ackerman steering, slip angles, foot prints, and all sorts of steering geometry tech. then rims and tyre tech on top of that. if you are new to all this its best to only do minor changes to achieve the best results, even the experts have their different theories on whats best but its usually trial and error, hopefully not expensive ones!

sorry to ramble on, hopefully havent got anything mixed up

[RobertoX]

I think the most important thing that hasn't really been covered is that you should not use roll centre adjusters to give you camber (I presume your mate is talking about the offset negative camber ones) if you don't want your roll centre adjusted also.

The RCAs will usually raise your roll centre which is a good thing once you have lowered your car and the roll centre is lowered as a by product. They will also change things like camber coefficent and bump steer characteristics which may or may not be desireable. Raising the roll centre too much can also cause jacking in roll (similar to what is done on drag cars with excessive anti squat but in the lateral direction)...

And you should probably give a better explanation of "looseness in the front end", do you mean something is rattling around or that you are understeering?

[celicapain]

Originally Posted by celicapain
increased castor positives- better turn in, higher mid corner grip
negatives-reduced straight line stability, wierd under brakes.

Please explain?

I found that when i was hard under brakes with lots of castor it would turn in harder than i actually wanted to, so i would have to compensate by not turning in as much when i was late braking. of course if i didnt brake so hard then itd turn normally and id usually screw up the line i was looking for.

[RobertoX]

Hey that's interesting, maybe the extra castor sort of 'amplified' slight differences side to side or something like that... (?)
I was just curious because I think it is fairly well accepted that more castor will increase straight line stability.

[Andrew162]

the looseness in my front end was attributed to buggered rack-ends, but that's not to say that this would be the problem with yours lil.