I took the widebody in last week to finally get it aligned after all of the suspension, brake and wheel upgrades. Installed on the car is the big brake kit, front and rear, 9X15" wheels front, 10X15" rear, Eibach black Prokit springs, ST sway bars, f/r, RB/Mazdacomp adjustable tension rods and LCAs and ReSpeed camber plates.

The alignment guy was great to work with, they set up race cars, mostly for circle dirt tracks. I took the FSM in with me to show him the specs, which weren't in the computer of course.

So here's the problem. He adjusted the camber plates as far as he could and both sides are at -2.5. He looked at the adjustment range on the LCAs and said even the 3/4" he could move them probably wouldn't get the camber back to street specs. With the camber so far out, his machine wouldn't even register the caster, go figure.

The car does drive straight down the road now, before it acted like I was driving drunk, lol. But it will suffer increased tire wear and these tires were imported from Japan and this particular model is not sold in the US. In a couple weeks he gets a new alignment machine in and told me to come back then, hopefully he can get a better read on caster, camber and toe.

I'm not looking to set the alignment up for any particular type of racing, but if I did it would be for autocross. Right now I just want it set up for street driving.

So if anyone has any suggestions as to what I can change to help get the alignment back to street specs, I'm all ears.

The build thread on the widebody is in the following link.

https://www.rx7club.com/build-threads-293/unvieling-12a-bp-widebody-462184/

 

Pics of how the camber plates are installed?

Any non-stock suspension arms etc?

 

I'll get the camber plate pics posted tomorrow. The rear suspension arms are stock but I do have the adjustable front lower control arms and tension rods. Every bushing has been replaced with the black poly ones and the tie rods and ball joints were replaced less than 4k miles ago. The idler and pitman are good, Illuminas on all 4 corners. Installed power steering and there's no play in the steering wheel.

I'm wondering if I may need to go back to the stock LCAs. Tires are 225/50/15 front, 245/50/15 rear. For some reason I had to add 3/16" spacers, front and back, to get the caliper and rotors to line up. The front spacers were installed between the rotor and wheel in the front. In the rear, they spacers needed to be installed between the Moser hubs and the rotors.

Arrows on the strut tops are set to stock specs. Car was a an 85 GS, now has an S3 lsd. When I did the restoration, stripping the unibody down to bare metal, it had the usual dents and dings but no major body damage that would require frame straightening.

 

Here's the pics of the camber plates. I did get to thinking, are they installed upside down?

Right hand side


Left hand side

 

It looks like you could swap them and be able to take out more camber. If your front lowers are longer than stock you will probably need to just to get the strut to stand up where it needs to be.

You might be able to just flip the top plates over instead of swapping them side to side. A little extra castor won't hurt if you can't get back to the stock range. You will actually get a little more camber gain as you turn the wheel which is nice on a strut car.

 

Looks like the same way mine are installed (if memory serves).


.

 

trochoid, The plates are installed correctly. The caster offset is towards the firewall. I would suspect the lower control arms are set longer than stock. A quick measurement of them will tell you.

-billy

 

Not to be picky, but you may want to put washers on those nuts... If they don't fit see if you can make a "dual" washer that is a plate w/2 holes in it to work for both studs at once.

 

Good point. Where did your washers go T?