The car feels slightly unstable at speeds over 70 mph. When I started to poke around I noticed that the driver side fender of the car is a little more than 1 inch lower than the rest of the car. The other three corners sit even at 25 3/8” while the drivers side corner sits about 24”. The wheel is way off in camber and the inner edge of the tire is almost bald while the outer edge looks fine (the passenger side tire is even all around), so whatever the problem is, it looks like it’s been like this for a while.

Car has Tein SS coilovers and everything I measure on the front coilovers lines up evenly (strut tower to spring, threads on strut, etc.). I just bought this car about a month ago (my 2nd FD) and do not know all of the history. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Matt

 

Find a race shop in your area that has corner scales and get it corner weighted. That'll even out the weights between the corners and should fix the handling. That is unless the spring is the wrong rate or something like that.

 

Thanks… I hadn’t had much luck finding a shop that can corner weigh the car, so today I decided to adjust each corner independently. I now have all 4 coilovers adjusted to different heights as measured by the threads between the bottom of the locknut and the strut (where the threading starts). I did not compress any of the springs.

The front struts now measure about a 1.25” difference from each other and the rears are a .25” difference. The car now sits at roughly 25” at each fender. The best I could do was to get at most a 3/8ths variance around the 4 corners (much better the 1.5” I had before).

Has anybody else had to do this to get an even ride height?

 

One thing to add, be absolutely, positively sure that the surface you're parked on when measuring is 100% flat.

Unless there's something wrong with the springs having very different rates side to side or the weight distribution is really wonky, there shouldn't be such a difference.

 

Surfaces were flat... It's strange. I just can figure it out. Nothing should be that unusual about weight distribution. Only thing I can thing is that the srings are way out of wack - but that sounds strange too. I never checked the spring numbers, maybe the front and rear are mixed or something crazy like that .

 

Just checked... spring numbers match. Same numbers on front, same numbers on Back.

 

Just because it says that it's the right number doesn't make it so. Maybe there's some racers newrby with corner scales that could help you out? Also, having a spring checker would be useful to check to make sure that the springs are indeed proper.

 

I talked to Tein technical support. They have a pretty amazing technical support… very smart guys and easy to get a hold of.

The guy said he has never had to replace a spring for a customer unless something went very wrong (accident or something). He said if the springs have the correct part number (they do) and measure the same when uncompressed (Free height, inner diameter top and bottom), then the spring is fine. I am going to pull both coilovers this weekend, re-measure the springs (maybe have them checked) and see if the top pillow ball mounts are shot (they look fine, but I’m out of ideas). If everything looks fine, I have two options: either the fenders themselves do not line up with each other or the frame is twisted. Both seem unlikely since everything on the car is straight as an arrow…

 

are you fat?

 

IIRC there was a thread on here(?) about deteriorating bump stops or somesuch that could result in different/lower ride heights....

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by drftwerks

are you fat?

Nope.

Quote:

Originally Posted by habu2

IIRC there was a thread on here(?) about deteriorating bump stops or somesuch that could result in different/lower ride heights....

I'll see if they are messed up when I remove them... but I would think that the car would have to be sitting on the bump stops to make a difference.

I'm also going to try to switch the front coilovers to see if the height differences switches sides... that will tell me if t's definitely the coilovers and not the car.

 

lmao! dang someone got to it first then me, only I was going to say there is a fat ghost sleeping in the car

 

So… I guess the third time is the charm. I figured it out this weekend; and it’s simple (as usual). The passenger side fender has been replaced or at least had a lot of work done on it. After measuring anything I could think of, I found that the passenger fender edge sits over a ½” higher and about a ½” further from the body than the driver fender. The teins were adjusted to the fender height, so they were adjusted differently and the car rode poorly. Using only the driver fender to adjust the height (to get 25”) and matching the thread length on the passenger side, everything worked out. The fender edge still sits higher (an inch), but the car is level based on everything I can measure and drives great.

Moral of the story… make sure your fenders are true!

 

You should probably take some measurements to a different area - such as the frame rail or subframe - to double check things.