Hi Guys,

I have a 2000 GS300 w/ the L-tuned Steering ECU and Bilstein/Eibach. It was handling okay (a little more road feel would be good) until recently. I took it in for some work and an alignment and it came back without any road feel (like the stock version) and there seems to be more power assist now. I think it's because the camber is now more positive than before and/or the toe is positive when it used to be negative.

I'm going to get the camber set more negative and have the toe be brought closer to zero or slightly negative to see if I can get the old feel back.

Any recommendations on what to set the camber to? Let's say I drive pretty aggressively when no one is around. At what level of negative camber will I actually see the inside of the tire wear more quickly?

Thanks guys!

 

Hey, gkim!

Sorry, I don't have any specific alignment settings for you. The definition of "road feel" is a little subjective.

The only specific info I have for you is the camber. Mine is set for 0 - front, -1.5 - rear. In retrospect, I probably should have done -0.5 front to get a more even tire wear on the fronts. The backs look good from where I am standing (after ~10K).


My advice to you is: get within factory spec and adjust the camber only (and not by much too). Having too much negative camber will diminish braking potential and might make the car unstable under braking (besides wearing your inside tire tread). Toe and caster adjustments might do wierd / evil things to the handling and you don't want any surprises down the road.

Since you don't have Toyota's resources to do adjustments, try them out, etc., start with a racing shop of some sort (they should know more about alignments in general than the dealer-type shop).

Good luck.

 

Hi Vlad_Stein,

Thanks for your advice. I had the alignment done and it's MUCH better now. Summary: I had the camber set to -0.5 (front) and -0.7 (rear); both well w/in spec and as much negative as they could get it (so they told me). The biggest change was getting the toe for both front and rear to be close to zero (0.0 +- 0.02) and total-toe to be close to zero. Previously, total-toe for the front was 0.21 and I think that was causing the very mushy steering feel (a little like driving on snow).

W/ the new toe and camber settings (actually, camber didn't change too much, maybe about 0.1 or 0.2), the car feels much more in control and responsive.

For some reason, braking also seems better but maybe it's just in my head.

Anyway, I'm MUCH happier with the car now. I'd actually like to adjust the camber a little more negative to see how that feels around corners, but I'm not complaining w/ how it is now.

Thanks!

 

gkim,

glad you like it... Enjoy

 

Thanks. I'm planning to enjoy it this weekend -- take the car to through some new curves.

I noticed that you seem to have the TRD sway bars. Since I also have the Bilstein/Eibach setup, I was wondering if you found a big improvement in adding the sway bars? Or did you do all the work at the same time?

I trying to decide if I should shell out the extra funds -- what's the fun factor return on the expense? Marginal? Excellent? Wahoo?

Thanks again!