Thread: Now What?

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I recently went to Autozone and purchased a couple rubber coil boots to be placed in my springs to strengthen them and add close to a 2" lift (as seen in the pics). Well for some reason this made my tires bow in at the tops! I then went to an alignment shop who said an alignment would fix this. Well it didn't and they still bow in at the top pretty bad. Now what can I do to fix this??? I thought it may be the wheels so I switched em' and no change!



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What you've done is screwed up the geometry of the front suspension with the extended spring. The spring has pushed the lower control arm down in the car and since the upper control arm is connected to the lower by the spindle, you've placed the upper arm into a downward part of the arc that it describes in bump and droop operation. When the upper arm went past center, it became effectively shorter, pulling the top of the tire toward the center of the car.

Look at the upper control arms where they mount to the frame. Are there any shims in there or did the first shop remove all of them in an attempt to correct the camber? The first shop you went to may have done all they could.

I know that somewhere, I've seen spindle extenders that can be added to the top of the spindle to add some negative camber gain to the geometry on bump by raising the outboard end of the upper control arm. These would tend to level the upper control arm in your case, changing its effective length and moving the top of the tire toward the outside of the car. Do a search on the web and see if you can find these items.

Thanks, thats a lot more than I knew before! Out of curiosity, do you have a diagram so I can get a visual? I'm a beginner mechanic, haha!

I don't have a scanner, or I'd draw you a picture. Looking at the car from the front, both upper and lower control arms are angled downhill from the frame to the spindle. Spindle extenders will bring the upper arm back to more or less level, adding to their effective length while having no influence on the lower arms and maintaining the jacked-up attitude of the front end.

Denny, are you looking? Could you post a diagram?

Some of the circle track racer catalogs such as "Smiley's Racing" list longer than stock upper ball joints for this problem. They have an online catalog.