Tim's Mystic Blue ZHP Coupe

[kakashi169]

looking good tim! what brush do u use when u are cleaning your rims?

[Galapolis]

Let me know about the RS4's. I was close to getting those as my daily tires but I chickened out and got the Indy 500s again. They are very similar to the DW Sport so your impressions would definitely be valuable to me.

[t.er]

looking good tim! what brush do u use when u are cleaning your rims?

Thanks Daniel! I actually use two of these dusting gloves which are more or less wash mitts in glove form. I've found that wearing them allows you to wrap your hands around each of the spokes to get a pretty thorough clean. To clean the barrels I bought something similar to a wheel woolie (though not nearly as expensive) when I was in Japan, though I'm sure you can probably find something similar locally or from Amazon. I can clean perhaps 70% of the barrel, the remaining 30% I can't get to due to minimal caliper to barrel clearance. Not a huge deal as with regular washes and the annual wheels-off wash + wax, brake dust never sticks. Oh, and also because I wax my rims, 95% of the brake dust comes off with a high concentrate of regular body soap. The remaining 5% of brake dust deposits I've found come off with brake cleaner.

Japanese "wheel woolie" on the top left:

Let me know about the RS4's. I was close to getting those as my daily tires but I chickened out and got the Indy 500s again. They are very similar to the DW Sport so your impressions would definitely be valuable to me.

Depending on how much street mileage you put per year, I think you made the right choice. I'm not sure I'd run a 200 tw tire as a daily, but if you visit mountains or do autox/track a lot then you may be able to squeeze by with running RS4s as your summer tire. My first autox is next weekend, and I plan to hit the track again next month so I'm pretty excited to see how they perform!

[t.er]

After spending some time at the track and learning what both myself and my car needed, I had my eye out for a set of camber plates, which would help with both cornering grip and tire wear. However, as I was on a budget, I quickly whipped up some fixed camber plates in CAD, and was planning on making them once the school re-opened. They’re basically the same as the TMS plates, the only difference was that I was planning on hammering the studs out from the stock strut mount, drilling the holes out to 10.5 mm, then pressing in press-in nuts. Thus, the strut mount could still be used without the camber plates by fastening with bolts to the car, if I was planning on putting a bunch of mileage on the car between events.



However, I found a very good deal on a set of used Ground Control camber plates locally, so I swept those up:



Everything seemed fine, except for some damage to the bearing seals, and slight “crunchiness” while rotating the bearings. So I decided to re-grease them:

Bearing seal damage:



Cleaned bearings:







Re-greased (the actual balls & cage were also greased before reassembly, just didn’t want to get my phone messy):





I initially attributed the “crunchiness” due to dirt embedded within the old grease. But to be honest, I didn’t feel a difference – the bearings do rotate smoothly, the only “crunchiness” is audible. Not sure what it is, but all the parts look okay, and I think it should be fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The next day I headed over to my friend’s place. He runs a K20-swapped EK Civic in Ontario Time Attack, so he had a decent set of tools I could use. Heck, my “impact” is really just a hand-me-down corded impact driver that barely pushes 50 ft-lbs of breakaway torque… that just shows you the extent of my equipment. He had a nice Milwaukee cordless impact that I needed to loosen and tighten the strut top nut, along with other stuff like scale pads & leveling plates for the DIY alignment.

So first things first, install the camber plates:





Pushed the camber plates all the way in, and you get some stancenation going on:



Then set up the scales & leveling plates:



Got the car on the scales. Take the corner weights with a grain of salt because although left and right were level, front and rear were on a slight downwards slope to the back. Well, it’s not like I can do any corner balancing anyways, with my Bilstein B4 dampers and stock springs.

7/8ths tank of gas, no driver, nothing else in the car aside from some spare fluids:



Then started doing the alignment:



My plan was to have a street and track setting, and I’d switch between the two for events. I was planning on running the following:

Street
-1.2 deg camber
0.06 deg toe in

Track
-2.7 deg camber
0.1 deg toe out

Camber was no issue. Unfortunately what ended up happening was that toe would keep changing, and was inconsistent when switching from track to street, then back to track. Heck, we even set camber and toe for the street, then I went for a drive, and the car was pulling to the left. Turned out that one of the tires somehow had 4 mm of toe, which is about 0.5 deg. So I’m starting to think that unless I did an alignment every time I went to change camber, toe would be thrown off. I may have to settle on a single setup for both track/street, something like -2.5 deg camber and near-zero toe, then set & forget.

I also have to go back and re-do the alignment as my car still pulls to the left slightly. Some things we will be doing next time to hopefully have a more accurate alignment:

• Roll the car forwards/back when adjustments are made, rather than just bouncing the car up/down
• Steering may have moved slightly, so a steering lock will be used

Swapping the camber plates out was relatively quick, the alignment took the most of the day and was a bit of a PITA. But it was a good learning experience and it allows you to tweak your setup without having to constantly shell out ~$100 for an alignment at a shop.

[sillieidiot]

Man doing the alignment sucks. But I did the same thing you did. I messed around with the settings until I found something that I liked and then I just pay for an alignment and make them align it to those settings lol

[ZHPizza]

Yeah something was definitely wack about how y'all were setting the toe. It should be consistent with the camber changes. Locking the steering wheel and rolling the car a bit would likely do the trick. There's plenty of stuff that binds up and will release when you roll it a bit.

[t.er]

Yeah something was definitely wack about how y'all were setting the toe. It should be consistent with the camber changes. Locking the steering wheel and rolling the car a bit would likely do the trick. There's plenty of stuff that binds up and will release when you roll it a bit.

I honestly don't know what's going on. Through the help of friends I got to use what was basically Smart Strings, we checked & re-checked that they were square with the car. Rear toe was found to be zero on both sides so at least my left rear toe adjustment was pretty spot-on. Front camber was set to -2.5 deg, with 0.1 deg toe out and yet I still have a gentle pull to the left, and a steering wheel that is 5-10 deg left of centre. We also rolled the car, and used a steering lock.

I'm starting to think it could be the positive camber wear i have on my front street tires that may be affecting something, though I don't believe this pull or off-centre steering was present prior to the camber plates. I'm going to start troubleshooting by swapping on my RS4s and going for a drive, and seeing if brand-new tires on all 4 corners will solve the alignment.

Man doing the alignment sucks. But I did the same thing you did. I messed around with the settings until I found something that I liked and then I just pay for an alignment and make them align it to those settings lol

lol yup... I might be doing that if I can't figure out the pull to the left, but then they may run into the same issue as well

[t.er]

So my steering wheel was canted about 5-10 degrees left from centre, along with a slight pull to the left. Got the brand-new RS4s on and nothing changed. Said screw it and shimmied both tie rods over the same number of turns, so my steering wheel is pretty much straight. However the pull is still present, though it seems to be better than before. I don't know, I may leave it for now... or I may have to hop on an alignment rack for peace of mind.

[fredo]

I suggest to get an alignment, specially because of your new tires. My 2 cents.

[t.er]

I suggest to get an alignment, specially because of your new tires. My 2 cents.

Yeah, if all else fails I'll have to just bite the bullet and hop on an alignment rack. Usually the DIY alignment is pretty sound, my friend hasn't had issues aligning cars like Civics or S2Ks. We're thinking it could be the steering guibo where the wheel is straight, but the rack isn't, because even though we used a steering lock there will still be a ton of play post-guibo. At least for my autox this weekend I'll run it as-is, sometime next week we'll re-string align and hopefully third time's the charm and it all works out.

Going to have to pay careful attention and line up the markers on the rack and the shaft, at least that will eliminate the guibo as being a source of error.