Hi,

Do i need a camber kit on my 2001 civic if i drop my suspention about a inch.

Thanks

 

Suspension***


And you don't "need" one but you should get one anyway because there might not be a noticeable camber but it's there & it'll wear out your tires, you can find an inexpensive kit on ebay.

 

I call bull. I ran -3.0 degrees of camber all the way around my old civic and had no premature wear after ~10,000 miles; wellfedhobo can vouch for me, as he bought the wheels with the tires I'd used. They had some slight feathering (most likely from me running without an alignment for a few weeks after dropping it), but no camber wear.

As far as I'm concerned, with small section-width tires (like you'd see on a civic... 195mm, 205mm, etc), a camber kit is only useful if you don't like the look of negative camber and don't care about the turning stability of running a little negative camber. Like I said, I ran with no camber correction (just had the toe put back into specification) with no problems, and my ej1 practically sat on the oil pan.

*ninja edit: excessive negative camber can wear tires prematurely, but I'd draw the line somewhere between 3 and 3.5 degrees of negative camber. Also, camber wear is more noticeable on wider tires, but I don't think I'll ever see 295/35-18 tires on a civic

 

wellll excuse meeee!!!!


I was ill informed but my spelling correction stands.

 

It's okay. Everyone seems to be uninformed about it except the guys actually running negative camber with correction for toe. I almost had an argument with one of the chassis/suspension instructors at WyoTech over it (had the sense to keep quiet though lol).

What happens is people slam their cars, have negative camber, and don't get the car aligned. Then they notice they have feathering on the inside edge of the tire and say "oh, that's from negative camber!" The problem is, using my civic as an example, we're talking toe measured in whole degrees (normally toe specifications have about a 0.10-0.20* spread) when a car is dropped more than an inch or two. That'll kill a set of tires within 3,000 miles. But if you leave the camber where it is and set the toe back to factory specifications (usually close to 0.00*, +/- 0.10*), you won't have any problems with tire wear caused by the camber.

 

It's even less of an issue on a mcpherson suspension... You'll be fine without the camber kit.

 

thanks guys