Forewarning to Everyone!, About lowering and rims, please read. Options

[Guest_Jason_*]

Currently i'm riding on Dropzone Coilover's (probably 3-3.5" drop) with 18" rims and 35 series tires.

When you lower your car, your wheels start to lean inwards due to the Camber from lowering your car. Well, after riding on a 3" drop for about 2-3 months now, I thought nothing of my Camber. About 2 days before switching from Lowering Springs to Coilover's, I had all 4 tires on my rims replaced with brand new Nankangs (a decent name brand). Friday night, driving home my back right tire popped, lost its seal with the rim and went completely flat. Consequently, the screwed up Camber caused irregular tire wear on all of my tires (but severly effected the back tires). My tires actually wore inside 4x faster than the outside, causing a very nicely noticeable slant in my tires. Now, these were only 2 month old Tires keep in mind.

After getting my car towed to my uncle's work, NTB wanted to deal with him, so they used my Car as a dummy car to see what kind of work NTB would do. They've been wanting to deal with my Uncle for awhile now, so he put them to the test with my car. Well today all the information cameback. After lowering my car, the negative Camber threw off the alignment very bad, caused irregular tire wear making the tire slant and shrink (weird eh?). Also, the back tire did something inside the fender that needed to be fixed. All and all, for 4 new tires, corrected alignment, mount and balancing and fixed camber, i'm 670$ in the hole... I could have avoided all of this if I would have been smart and did everything from the beginning like I should have.

Now, just a little note to all of you into lowering your car and playing with suspension... don't learn the hardway like I did, take my mistake to your advantage. When lowering your car, get the car taken to a shop immediatly to get your alignment redone and your camber fixed! Spend that 100$ or so (i'm not sure), before your almost 700$ in the hole later.

[SpedToe169]

Let me clarify what you're experiencing....Camber does not accelerate tire wear noticibly. Toe will a LOT. Your tires didn't wear becuse of the camber, they wore quickly because of the toe, probably toe out, that you got when you lowered your car. There is a thing called bump steer, basically it is a toe change caused by the movement of the suspension through its travel (i.e. the toe links aren't exactly parallel to the control arms at all times). So the to changes dynamically with the instantaneous ride height. When you lower your car, its like driving everywhere on a bump if you don't have it aligned. So to make a long story short, have your car aligned whenever you change the ride height.

If you really feel like it, its not all that hard to set the toe yourself. If people want to know how, I'll post a topic, if you would rather pay to have it done I won't bother.