Wheel Alignment - Odd Tyre Wear

[aaronng]

19x8, 45+ offset, running on 235/35/19'.

Would be awesome if you could post up the recommended specs for me aaronng. I'll print it out and give to the wheel alignment guys to check out.

235 and +45 is a little too far out. +50 or +55 would have been better, but i am not sure if it would rub against the strut. I'd recommend going for 225 width if you can get that in 19". After all, the Euro is not a car that needs that much tyre width.

Front:
Toe: 0mm (some tyre shops list +1mm toe in)
Camber: 0 degrees
Can't remember front castor, but you can't adjust it anyway with stock suspension.

Rear:
Toe: +2mm total toe in (+1mm on each side)
Camber: -1 degrees each side.

Be aware that going to -1 from -3 degrees rear camber would probably cause rubbing.

[chargeR]

Well, IMO, yes and no. If you run a lot of neg camber then inner edge wear is bound to be greater (I'd suggest 3° is a lot of camber for a road car, and especaially for a Honda fitted with double wishbone suspension).

True story, I have nearly 5 degrees of negative camber at the front of my car and whilst my street tyres are wearing well they are definitely wearing slightly faster on the inside edge. To put it in perspective I have had the tyres (Bridgestone RE001) on for around 25,000kms with 11,000kms with -5 camber and I expect them to last around 10,000kms more.

[gbang007]

gonna get new tyres in the next month or so coz of bad wear at the front. tyre pressure is fine. my car is lowered about 1.5". They were balanced when i got my tyres on about 2 years ago. Haven't really paid attention till a couple of months ago when it was too late. Anyway, should i just get the new ones on and get them to balance and then just keep my eye on them for uneven wear? or what can i do to prevent it getting to that stage again?

[aaronng]

gonna get new tyres in the next month or so coz of bad wear at the front. tyre pressure is fine. my car is lowered about 1.5". They were balanced when i got my tyres on about 2 years ago. Haven't really paid attention till a couple of months ago when it was too late. Anyway, should i just get the new ones on and get them to balance and then just keep my eye on them for uneven wear? or what can i do to prevent it getting to that stage again?

What are the current alignment settings on your car?

[gbang007]

NFI! lol. i just got new wheels put on like 2 years ago back in the noob days.

What are the current alignment settings on your car?

[JohnL]

True story, I have nearly 5 degrees of negative camber at the front of my car and

That's an awful lot of camber. IMO the only time it's going to be productive is when cornering very hard with a lot of weight transfer to the outside front tyre, but only if you have enough body roll to cause that 5° of camber to be negated and for the contact patch to be presented to the road 'squarely' under full roll (and of course the inside front camber will be utterly terrible rendering the inside front tyre almost useless for much of the corner, nearly all front grip will have to be generated by the outside front only).

If you have a fair degree of roll stiffness you might never even get that outside front contact patch presented squarely to the road, meaning the full potential grip from either of the front tyres may never be realised, even at mid corner with max body roll (?).

Keep in mind too that with body roll the camber of the inside front tyre becomes even more disadvantageous, and the more so the more the static neg camber is. With FWD we rely more upon inside front grip then RWD cars do, so we should be careful not to compromise inside front grip too much with excessive neg camber angles.

Having the inside front runing on it's inner edge of tread won't be very good for either lateral front grip (read understeer), nor for longitudinal traction exiting corners (read inside front wheelspin). High levels of neg camber will compromise front tyre braking performance, and this becomes even worse with nose dive under hard braking. This is more problematic for double wishbone designs than for Mac struts because double wishbone suspensions gain more neg camber with bump motion (as you get with nose dive). Under brakes, you have the static neg camber + any neg camber gain from the bump motion, which isn't all that much with Mac struts but substantially more with double wishbone (typically), so with substantial static neg camber to start with you may end up braking on effectively quite small front contact patches...

One of the main benefits of a well designed double wishbone suspension is that less static neg camber is required to maximise dynamic performance than with Mac struts (and performance will be greater than Mac strut, all else being equal), but with so much camber I suspect you're suspension might be being held back nearer Mac strut type performance...

[aaronng]

NFI! lol. i just got new wheels put on like 2 years ago back in the noob days.

Get an alignment done and ask for a printout. Putting on new tyres with NFI alignment is just asking for wear if the previous set of tyres were chewed through because of alignment.

[chargeR]

That's an awful lot of camber. IMO the only time it's going to be productive is when cornering very hard with a lot of weight transfer to the outside front tyre, but only if you have enough body roll to cause that 5° of camber to be negated and for the contact patch to be presented to the road 'squarely' under full roll (and of course the inside front camber will be utterly terrible rendering the inside front tyre almost useless for much of the corner, nearly all front grip will have to be generated by the outside front only).

If you have a fair degree of roll stiffness you might never even get that outside front contact patch presented squarely to the road, meaning the full potential grip from either of the front tyres may never be realised, even at mid corner with max body roll (?).

Keep in mind too that with body roll the camber of the inside front tyre becomes even more disadvantageous, and the more so the more the static neg camber is. With FWD we rely more upon inside front grip then RWD cars do, so we should be careful not to compromise inside front grip too much with excessive neg camber angles.

Having the inside front runing on it's inner edge of tread won't be very good for either lateral front grip (read understeer), nor for longitudinal traction exiting corners (read inside front wheelspin). High levels of neg camber will compromise front tyre braking performance, and this becomes even worse with nose dive under hard braking. This is more problematic for double wishbone designs than for Mac struts because double wishbone suspensions gain more neg camber with bump motion (as you get with nose dive). Under brakes, you have the static neg camber + any neg camber gain from the bump motion, which isn't all that much with Mac struts but substantially more with double wishbone (typically), so with substantial static neg camber to start with you may end up braking on effectively quite small front contact patches...

One of the main benefits of a well designed double wishbone suspension is that less static neg camber is required to maximise dynamic performance than with Mac struts (and performance will be greater than Mac strut, all else being equal), but with so much camber I suspect you're suspension might be being held back nearer Mac strut type performance...

Good observations JohnL , however I simply posted up my experience with tyre wear to demonstrate that camber is not the evil that many presume it to be , which pertains to the thread topic, not to get a lecture on how terrible my suspension setup is .

My suspension is being held back to Macpherson strut performance because my front suspension is Macpherson strut . I can nearly lift my inside front wheel on track so I am not super worried about the very poor camber that the inside wheel has. You are correct though, tyre temps suggest that my camber is a little excessive with higher inner temps and a differential of a few degrees across the tread. Nothing extreme though and the setup works.

[eg5civic]

Get an alignment done and ask for a printout. Putting on new tyres with NFI alignment is just asking for wear if the previous set of tyres were chewed through because of alignment.

Hey i got my alignment done today and new re001's all round

What confused me was they llft the camber and toe as they were on the rear when i got a 4 wheel alignment... all they changed was .1mm of cross toe

Sheets attached at the bottom

Also found why my front left tyre wore quickly...... +9mm of toe :P

Oh and to hurt me even further they ut my car as a 1.5L SOHV

WTF is SOHV... its clearly DOHC

[aaronng]

Hey i got my alignment done today and new re001's all round

What confused me was they llft the camber and toe as they were on the rear when i got a 4 wheel alignment... all they changed was .1mm of cross toe

Sheets attached at the bottom

Also found why my front left tyre wore quickly...... +9mm of toe :P

Oh and to hurt me even further they ut my car as a 1.5L SOHV

WTF is SOHV... its clearly DOHC

Looks good. I wonder why they didn't adjust your rear toe. The stock suspension should have some limited adjustment of rear toe....

[eg5civic]

yeah thats what i thought.... do you think i should ring and question them on it or just wait the month or so till i get my coilovers

[aaronng]

yeah thats what i thought.... do you think i should ring and question them on it or just wait the month or so till i get my coilovers

I might be wrong though, I'm not 100% sure of your Civic. If you do have the facility, get them to readjust it under "warranty". Many tyre places let you do a free realignment if there are problems if you don't like what they did. When you get your coilovers, you will have to redo your alignment because you are changing your car's height.