Superpro Fg Front Camber Kit A Waste Of Money - Diy Guide With Pics

[jabtronic]

Most people take their lowered XR6 in for a wheel alignment and are informed that there's not enough room left on the camber bolts for the amount of shims required to adjust the camber back to factory specs.

I was in the same boat, I've lowered the front of my FG ute using SSSL springs and then it's another 8mm lower again because I have Bilstein shocks with the spring installed on the lowest of the 3 settings. HTG measurement is around 335mm (which fills the guard perfectly). My camber was around -2.5° so I needed 1.5° of adjustment to bring it back to -1.0°

Now I only had around 10mm left on the upper control arm bracket bolts. The figure for adjustment (from Superpro) is ~9mm of shims = 1° of adjustment. This means I would need around 13.5mm of shims installed to correct the camber. The bolts were not long enough obviously, any suspension shop would say "you need a camber kit".

Superpro make a camber kit which is "designed to allow Camber Adjustment on Standard Height & XR Ride Height Vehicles only." The kit is around $100 and you need two kits per vehicle so that's 200 bucks. Each kit comes with 2 brackets, 3x 6mm, 2x 3mm and 4x 1.6mm shims BUT you need to put 1x each shim on EACH bracket for the kit to be the same as standard. So really you're only getting 1x 6mm, 0x 3mm and 2x 1.6mm for adjustment. How am I supposed to install 2x 13.5mm of shims per side with only 1x 6mm shim and 2x 1.6mm shims?

The kit might be preferable for a suspension shop which has extra shims they can use but you've just basically forked out $200 for some brackets with longer bolts and no change to the camber (and I'm not sure just how much longer the bolts are after putting 1 of each shim back on?).

I ended up going the DIY option which is installing longer bolts into the standard brackets. It's easy, costs $3-$5 for 8x M10x45mm bolts and only took an hour or so.

First you need to remove the brackets from the car. I have a hoist but its easy to do on jack stands just remove the wheel, undo 2 bolts on the upper control arm then undo the 4 bolts in the engine bay and the 2 brackets will come out. Check the condition of your upper control arm bushes, mine were stuffed. Make sure you take note of previously installed shims and their positions.

1 bracket removed

This is the bracket, that's a shim.

Now, find a bit of heavy wall pipe that fits over the head of the bolt and put the pipe in a vice. Position the bolt head on the pipe and hit the bolt through with a hammer. The bolts are fusion welded onto the bracket but come out pretty easily. You'll need to clean up the welds so the new bolts sit flush. That's a 5mm shim on the right.

Length of old bolt is 35mm

Length of new bolt is 45mm (M10 bolts btw)

Now you can either just place bolt through or you can weld them in to make them easier to do up in the vehicle. I welded my bolts in and a quick coat of paint.

After that it's just reassembly making sure to put the shims in their original positions. I milled up some 12.5mm shims out of alluminium which you can see behind the factory shim in this pic. I still need to get a wheel alignment but this should help cut down the amount of adjustment required.

Shims are pretty easy to make, if they don't need to be removed easily just use some flat bar in whatever thickness you want and drill 2 holes.. easy. Your wheel alignment place will have shims anyway. The Superpro shims are made to easily slot in without removing the bracket.

That's all there is to it.. hope it helps save forking out $200

[Ralph Wiggum]

Nice write up, I haven't uses the sp kit but the pedders be series kit uses different upper arm bolt hole locations so the correct upper arm geometry is maintained (so the castor and camber is correct mid turn) once the cars lowered.

I did a similar mod with the bolts except I made a platform to lock the bolts and the installed them so the bolt head is in the bay and the threads and nuts are in the wheel well. I can literally change camber/castor without removing the wheel.

[jabtronic]

I was going to do that also but in the end couldn't be bothered :D It's easy to undo the bolts in the engine bay for drivers side and from underneath for passenger side so I didn't bother.

Pretty easy to do just make a plate with two holes, weld the bolts to the plate instead and push them through, is there enough room to manoeuvre the plate with bolts through from the engine bay though? Turbo would be in the way?

[Ralph Wiggum]

There's bulk room in a b series haven't made a set for a f series yet.

[Lennox]

Wow that's easy thanks for the info. Is it ok just bringing it straight out like that as opposed to angling it with different bolt holes like you say ralph? For your average user who's not gonna be breaking any world land speed records..

Edited 20/12/15 11:39 PM by Lennox