Ownership Verified: Cursed 92 Camaro is back...

FYI plastidip does not survive tire changing. it is too soft. expect to have to touch them up or re do them after the tires are mounted.
 
FYI plastidip does not survive tire changing. it is too soft. expect to have to touch them up or re do them after the tires are mounted.

Yeah I expected that, so I only did one wheel to see how it looked. And I did have to put another coat on it but I was surprised at how well it blended.

I've got these on the car... Im a little annoyed with how I was unable to get the axle centered. A bunch of junk inside my panhard bar fell out and clogged up the threads and I couldnt get the rod end far enough into the PHB to center the axle. It was close, but now that Im looking at the car, not nearly close enough. Im going to have to pull it out and clean it, maybe chase it with a tap, and try again. Threads look fine but it just doesnt want to thread in past a certain point. Ironically, the thing was threaded almost all the way in before I started messing with it, so I know it's not a mechanical issue. I also need to address the fender gap on the rear passenger side. That spring just doesnt want to cooperate with me, which is annoying because I spent two hours monday afternoon doing a homebrew alignment. Lowering that side will change the orientation of the rear axle slightly and throw that off a little. And Im also REALLY dissatisfied with the color. It's just way too dark, I really wanted something more gray than black. But maybe Im just being too critical.

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The fronts required 2 inch adapters.

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I expected a lot worse clearance issues from a 17x11 and 315/35/17 tires... but it really wasnt bad at all. 5 minutes with a 40 oz hammer and it was good to go.

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If I were a little more aggressive with the hammer and cut the bump stops off I think I could go from 1.25 inch adapters to 1 inch adapters on the rears... and tuck them in another 1/4 inch. But Im not sure the level of modification vs the visual improvement is worth it. I still havent taken this thing to an autocross with these so I dont know if there are situations where it will rub or not, but so far so good.

So I ended up with Nitto NT555's. I would rather have NT05's but the tread life on those is awful, I need these to last til I finish college.

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This is the side that sticks out a little farther than the other. By my measurements around 3/8ths of an inch farther out than the other side. I plan to pull the PHB out of the car and get it cleaned out this weekend. Should take less than a hour if I can do it without putting the car in the air, but that may be unavoidable.
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And this is how I did my homebrew alignment. (Really I was just setting toe, but when you pay alignment shops $100 to do work, generally all they do is mess with the toe anyway). Try to get the string as straight as possible coming off the rear tire (You will see it bend or not touch otherwise) and then use that to measure off the front wheel. If you REALLY want to be precise you can use 4 jackstands and set it up so that the string is equidistant from the rear rim at the front and rear (the tire is, for my purposes, uniform enough, but from a precision point of view the sidewalls are not generally the best measurement reference) and then extend it to the front of the car. Make sure every time you do adjustments you write down your measurements, because a given adjustment may turn the steering wheel or the tire on the other side and you need to measure both sides and check the steering wheel for straightness after every adjustment.

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Of course, it helps me a lot that I've gotten some billet steel hex adjustment sleeves for my tie rods so all I have to do is put a regular wrench on them to turn them. Has jam nuts to hold it in place.

And I've got some centercaps on the way. Just a matter of whether or not I should paint them the same color as the wheels. Im thinking yes. It's easy to do "too much" just because you can. I was, however, considering doing a red accent line around the outside of the wheel, but Im not sure how to deal with the wheel weights if I do that. I was hoping they'd use weights on the inside of the wheel but they didn't.
 
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Looking good, you could do the red accent and leave the wheel weights alone, something akin to the SLS AMG wheels that really look good in motion because of that little oddity. I would paint the center caps just to have them not stand out compared to the rest of the rim

 
Is it common for the rear wheels to stick out mismatchedly on these? My GF's brother used to drive a V6 one which generally looked like the axle wasn't in the right spot anymore.
 
Is it common for the rear wheels to stick out mismatchedly on these? My GF's brother used to drive a V6 one which generally looked like the axle wasn't in the right spot anymore.

Theres a bar called the panhard bar that swings through an arc and locates the axle fore and aft on the car. Due to hte way its designed, if the car is lowered it will make it stick out too far to one side.

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Or he might have had a rear axle from a newer car that makes them stick our farther. 2 inches per side. It looks awful.

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So I was very uncompetitive at the last autocross despite going to bigger tires. The time has now come for me to stop throwing shiny parts on it and start doing actual suspension setup to get the thing sorted.

What happens is the car responds very well to steering inputs, but the rear of the car likes to come around and go into full on drift mode if I throw it in a corner too hard. My corner entry speeds are leaving a lot to be desired.

After doing a lot of research, it seems as if the it's a combination of factory suspension design issues combined with lowering the car further compounding those issues. The front center of gravity is too high above the front roll center. As the car is lowered, teh front roll center gets closer and closer to the ground much faster than the center of gravity does. The rear roll center drops much slower, so my roll center for the car goes from in the dirt in the front of the car to the hatch glass in the rear (not quite that pronounced, but thats the basic idea). As I pitch the car into a corner it will roll over on the front tire and lift a lot on the inside rear tire, leaving only one rear tire for any significant amount of traction. This is compounded further by my very large rear sway bar and slightly smaller than ideal front sway bar.

You can actually see how the car dives onto the front tire hard during any sort of lateral cornering. This is halfway through this corner, not under hard braking. Note how much weight the car is throwing on the front tire, and how much the car is trying to lift the inside rear tire.
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So the solution is to get a panhard bar relocation kit that lowers the axle side panhard bar mount an adjustable amount. This will lower the rear roll center. It will keep the front of the car from rolling over and lifting the rear inside tire so much. This requires much stiffer rear springs and a stiffer rear sway bar than normal. I can, for now cut the factory rear springs and stiffen them up and lower the rear of the car. Since I can keep the roll center low lowering the rear of the car doesnt matter. This is somewhat counterintuitive, but by increasing the difference between the center of gravity and the roll center, I can tune the behavior of the car going into a corner. At least that's the idea. I already have the biggest available rear sway bar and a good set of shocks to control the higher spring rates so Im covered in that regard. Now lowering the rear of the car a lot will leave the car lower in the back than the front...

But theres more. The other half of the solution is extended ball joints. http://daymotorsports.com/proddisp.php?ln=25437

These will basically act as drop spindles and restore factory front suspension geometry while simultaneously lowering the car by .5" . This will result in bump steer (toe in under compression) but there's nothing I can really do about it. A bump steer kit isnt going to fit inside my wheel hub. But Im thinking it will be worth it. It will bring the front roll center up towards the front CG further balancing the car.

There is no "goal" here, except to help the car balance traction on all four tires better, and right now it's pitching over onto the outside front tire badly, so if I can address the roll center issue it should be a LOT better about it. This will lower the car by .5 inches in the front and ideally .5-.75 inches in the rear. As a side effect, decreasing the distance between the front roll center and center of gravity will give the cg less leverage on the front suspension which will allow me to run slightly softer springs and maybe a softer sway bar, which compensates for my factory front sway bar which is large at 34mm, but the largest factory bar is 36mm so it's technically less than ideal in this case. raising the roll center back up will actually compensate for this and should help the car get better mechanical grip on the front since large sway bars are inherently compromises. You give up grip for trying to stabilize the car.

Anyway, for those that read that far and have any comments/corrections, I'm glad to hear it. This is stuff I've only recently learned about, and Im still figuring it all out.

And as far as cosmetic stuff, I plastidipped the wheels anthracite but I got tired of people thinking they were black, so I decided to experiment. I got some plastidip "pearlizer". It's a glossifier with white plastidip mixed in (opaque) with a pearl additive. This stuff out of a can is a bit tricky to apply allegedly, but I think it turned out FANTASTIC. It's not an exact copy of corvette competition gray which is what I was after the whole time, but it's even cooler than that color to me.

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And a memorial picture of my muffler. It decided to depart the vehicle while in transit from this photoshoot never to be found again. I can only presume some good samaritan snagged it before I could get back to it again. It sounded amazing, but was insanely loud. I've got a Hooker Aerochamber on the way that should tame it down quite a bit.

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Panhard bars don't locate a solid axle fore and aft. It does locate it laterally or side-to-side.

Yeah, you're going to run into bump steer with that setup.. Baer used to make special 'tracker' tie rods to try to eliminate or reduce the problem, but I think they've been discontinued. Might want to ask around on Camaro forums to see if anyone knows of a current source.

I would seriously either get the correct sized front antiroll bar or downsize your rear one. Your snap oversteer problem is probably *caused* by your mismatched bars - in fact it may be entirely caused by your bars. On most rear-drivers, the rear bar should be considerably less stiff than the front unless you want to be Super Dorifto Man; your car is exhibiting not roll center issues caused by lowering (IMHO) but classic 'too much rear bar' at this point.

Links of interest from various handling bibles:

http://books.google.com/books?id=cr...onepage&q=too much rear anti roll bar&f=false

http://books.google.com/books?id=i2...onepage&q=too much rear anti roll bar&f=false

Extended ball joints would be something to investigate after you sort out the screwed anti-roll balance. I wouldn't fit them unless I absolutely had to because they have an ugly tendency to go snap-crackle-pop-I'm-broken on the street.
 
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Panhard bars don't locate a solid axle fore and aft. It does locate it laterally or side-to-side.

Yeah it was a bad choice of words. I was speaking from a point of view perspective, not a car-centric perspective. Definitely a bad choice of words...


Yeah, you're going to run into bump steer with that setup.. Baer used to make special 'tracker' tie rods to try to eliminate or reduce the problem, but I think they've been discontinued. Might want to ask around on Camaro forums to see if anyone knows of a current source.

They sell bump steer kits for these cars, the only problem is it's impossible to fit them with wide front wheels. With 18's it's really tight, with 17's the tie rod is sitting right next to the lip of the wheel on the inside of the car and to correct the geometry you need to put the tie rod end basically into the side of the wheel.

This is a 17x9.5 like mine:
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With a drop ball joint it will lower the tie rod end another .5 or whatever inches of the drop stud so you can see the problem. Pushing the tire farther out isnt a good idea either. These cars have issues with scrub radius already.

If I was running factory 16x8's or some drag racer skinnies it wouldn't be an issue. Talking to some friends in the game they act like the bump steer in the front steering of these cars when lowered this amount is almost nothing compared to what you see in some other cars and basically blow it off as a non-issue in the big picture. I dont know how true that is, but I do know there's several of them that dont run the bump steer correction kits and dont have any serious problems and are competitive. I'm assuming the trade off is more front tire wear in very hard cornering.

Im gambling that getting the front roll center up is worth an increase in bump steer (toe in under compression in my case). It will create less body roll and therefore less bump deflection so that will help too. If that doesn't work out, then I can always go back to factory length ball joints and wait until I get some 18" wheels, but from what I can tell of what my buddies are doing it should be fine. But that's why Im planning to only go with a .5" extended stud instead of a .75 or 1". No need to shoot for the moon on what's basically an experiment.

I would seriously either get the correct sized front antiroll bar or downsize your rear one. Your snap oversteer problem is probably *caused* by your mismatched bars - in fact it may be entirely caused by your bars. On most rear-drivers, the rear bar should be considerably less stiff than the front unless you want to be Super Dorifto Man; your car is exhibiting not roll center issues caused by lowering (IMHO) but classic 'too much rear bar' at this point.

34/24 is actually a factory combination. Clearly for my car it's not working, though. This combo isnt as common as 36/24, or 34/21, but it was on some factory cars. Lowering the car (And the roll center migration due to that) really exacerbates it though. I've got no doubt in my mind that going to a smaller rear bar will help, and Im looking for one locally. I've found that a smaller rear bar and increasing my rebound on my shocks SHOULD be enough to seriously mitigate the tendency of the rear to slide out without changing any suspension geometry.

But getting an adjustable bracket and lowering the rear roll center and raising the front roll center will actually match up the front and rears beautifully as it is, (I hope, should be interesting to experiment with). I plan to have a bunch of bars laying around at some point, but just a matter of finding time to go out to the boneyards and collecting what I can find. I can always go back and forth and fine tune and as long as I can source the bars locally they will be cheap.


Extended ball joints would be something to investigate after you sort out the screwed anti-roll balance. I wouldn't fit them unless I absolutely had to because they have an ugly tendency to go snap-crackle-pop-I'm-broken on the street.

The ones Im looking at are designed for circle track race car duty and are rebuildable and modular and allegedly very strong. The problem is that it is apparently a complete pain in the ass to find a dust boot to fit them. Also, you and I both know that racecar parts may well be stronger, but stronger doesnt mean more durable in a street driven environment. Was curious if the ones you're familiar with are of a similar design as these Im looking at. None of the guys that run these are having problems with them that I've found beyond the dust boot issue but they're not daily drivers either. And to be fair, my car only really gets driven on weekends so it's not even a daily at this point, but it's still a valid concern. Im going to research it further.

The front ball joints are an idea Im wanting to try, but I'm not in any particular rush to do it. I just replaced them a few years ago (with the best, or at least most expensive ball joints the store had in stock, TRWs) and they probably have less than 15k miles on them. So if I can make it work without them I'm happy to do it. Apparently none of the nationally competitive Solo II thirdgen cars run extended ball joints, and they work just fine with the front roll center at ground level. I imagine it's just something that you can tune around (I need to read some of those handling books). But that doesn't mean there's not a competitive advantage there. So I dont know...
 
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