This thread doesn't match it's title anymore, as I edited the text.

We have an Ingalls camber kit on the front of our 89 CRX. We took it to get aligned, and the guy said that the kit didn't allow for any more negative camber. The wheels looks like they were at about 0 degress.

Looking on Ingalls site, they say that the max neg camber these things can be set at is -0.75 deg. Does this mean that this is how much ADDITIONAL neg camber it can gain, based on your ride height, or is this the absolute max neg camber?

In other worse, if I lower the car a couple inches and induce -2deg camber, will this inglalls kit allow me to get -2.75? Or does it mean that I will be limited to -0.75 period?


Modified by JustinHoMi at 6:08 PM 2/19/2006

 

This is one of the main faults I find with Ingalls stuff. (besides the overall poor constuction, and failure rate of the parts)

According to them, you can get negative camber out of thier kits, which leads to the question of why? The only real use for a camber correction kit is to fix a negative camber problem by increasing camber (positively).

Sure, negative camber has it's uses, but those who are typically looking for it (road racers, cone dodgers, and other cornering types) usually get more than they need jut by lowering the car to a more usable height.

ALL cars are designed to have negative camber when lowered. This is not really a product of the lowering, but a product of the designed in cornering ability.

As a car turns a corner, the outside wheels rise in the car (or the car lowers around them). Meanwhile the car leans to the outside. If the wheel did not tip in as the car pushed down, the tires would have instant positive camber. The factory suspension design of nearly every car is made so that the wheel and tire stay mostly vertical as the body leans into (or technically, out of) a corner.

When you lower the static height of a car, the suspension reacts as though you are constantly turning. That camber correction built into the suspension becomes an "all the time" stance.

Ingalls kits (and others that relocate the pivot end of the upper arm) are designed to move the factory length arm further from the center-line of the car, pushing the top of the spindle out, and positively affecting camber.

Unfortunately, on the 4gen cars (88-91 civic and CRX) there is little to no room for the stock upper to move outward. the upper frame rail and the pocket the arm goes into are very narrow, and quite shallow. If you move the upper arm out with a pivot kit, you are likely going to find the ball joint end of the arm hitting the upper frame rail (tho people have resorted to beating the upper rail out, or grinding the end of the arm off, neither choice a happy one)

If your CRX is stock height and has zero camber (which is what the factory intended) and you want to induce negative camber, there really is no room inboard of the upper arm to push it back, and tilt the spindle. I would suggest first lowering the car. Lowering the car will improve the roll center height of the car, as well a lower the center of gravity....and it will create negative camber as a by-product.

A pivot kit, like Ingalls, will allow you to de-camber the spindle, and get you closer to vertical again, or whatever amount of negative camber (that is less than you have before the install) you are trying to acheive.

The long and the short of it is this:

Installing the Ingalls kit on a 4g civic will not allow for anymore negative camber than the stock pivots create, because they cannot push the upper control arm any further into the car than the stocks do.

There is an adjustable upper control arm for the 88-91 cars currently available for a rediculous $500 a pair. They are modified stock arms, and they employ non-honda ball joints (I think they are aftermarket toyota pickup parts). And, sadly, looking at the pics, they don't look like they offer anymore postive camber adjustment than the stock arm comes with.

I have designed an upper control arm for the 4g civic (2g CRX) that uses factory honda parts and will be much more tunable than anything currently offered by any company. As soon as the testing is done on my cars, I'll be offering them to the general public.

(Sorry for such a long post, but i only get 5 a day, I have to use them wisely)


Modified by psychoboy at 5:41 PM 2/19/2006


Modified by psychoboy at 5:43 PM 2/19/2006


Modified by psychoboy at 5:43 PM 2/19/2006

 

Thanks for the detailed post . We have lowered the car a little bit. We haven't gone too low since the ZC headers exit so close to the ground.

My brother had a shop put the Ingall's kit on a year or so ago in an effort to reduce the negative camber. They set the camber to approx 0. According to the kit specs, it'll allow 0.75" of neg camber, but I don't really know if that is total, or relative to whatever camber is on the car already. The guy at the alignment shop said it couldn't go any further negative, but he didn't seem so sure.

One of the kit's bushings was bad, and we had to get the car ready for a race, so we removed the kit and replaced both upper control arms. Now that we have time, I have to decide whether or not it is worth putting the kit back on.

I'm not really a Honda guy (this is my brother's car... I just codrive it and work on it). Is the 4g civic suspension the same as the CRX? If so... let me know when they are ready. We might be interested if the price is reasonable.

 

If you want info from someone dealing directly with Ingalls and SPC, feel free to contact me.