Hi guys,

I went to get an alignment today and the techs told me that all they could get for the Front Right camber was -1.6. They said that it cant be adjusted but I told them that it could be, so I asked them to switch the camber bolt. They said that wouldn't work and said that -1.6 was the best they could do.

Oddly, the driver's side could be adjusted back to -1.

After getting home, I took off my front right wheel to see the orientation of the bolt but I am confused as to the proper directionality. Could you guys please tell me which way the bolt needs to face to add positive camber so I can go back and get aligned to stock specifications?

Also, I am on stock springs but have the whiteline RCK on because I was previously lowered on eibachs. Should this cause the camber issue?

 

Good question...anybody?

 

Maybe take a look at the driver side and see if there is any difference in the direction of the bolts. I know if you flip them one way or another you can get more of less camber. I would take a look at mine but don't have my car.

Matt

 

Dot to the inside = less negative camber. Dot to the outside = more negative camber. Dot anywhere other than straight in or straight out = incompetent tech broke your car.

ps. this would have taken you five seconds to find by searching

 

i thought the dot was only for dealership markings ...

 

I have no clue what the above means, but the dot tells you whether the bolt is set to -1* or -2*.

 

I loosened that bolt and his brother (under), then I started turning camber bolt until reached -2° and after all I tightened them again.
In my evo dots on bolts were in random directions and now with same camber L/R they are in different positions.

 

See my above post on "incompetent tech."

It's a remove-flip-and-reinstall bolt, not a rotate-in-place bolt.

You've almost definitely damaged something doing what you did.

 

Dot dot doesn't mean anything. Only for dealer to make sure the customer does not tamper with the suspension. If so, warranty will be void on suspension. Mine are random direction set on -2 degree.

 

Everything that you wrote is wrong.

The dots tell you where the eccentric lobe on the bolt is.

You are allowed to "tamper" with the suspension without "voiding" the warranty on suspension-related parts, since flipping the bolt is an approved practice.

If your bolts are installed "randomly" then you have done it wrong. As I already wrote, we have two-option bolts, not infinitely-adjustable bolts.

 

So can u explain all the red dots found under the engine bay mean? You are right, close thread.

 

Maybe your car has a disease.

 

Iowa,
maybe I don't have your experience, maybe I'm not as good as you in mechanics and surely you'll be a good technician but:
the "I know everything you don't know nothing and you are wrong" inside a forum is a non constructive behaviour. So if you wrote what you've done, I do the same and we can compare solutions: I think it's usefull, otherwise I don't have any time to spend fighting a person that knows is right. Maybe you can help me understand why I'm wrong.

1) I've damaged something doing what? Loosening 2 bolts and tightening them again?

2) You know why some components are kept in place with 2 bolts? Because with only one, parts can rotate around that fulcrum. So you can flip the bolt without loosing the other (one bolt forces to keep all in place and the other, due to the eccentric lobe, tries to get more negative camber) but in my case it was better to work without any residual stress on the component. You are free to do what is better for you but don't I have damaged something because it's a little too much.

3) I think you are right because something is used to indicate the eccentric lobe (dot or arrow doesn't matter) but the fact is that any part is built with a % of statistic production error. If these errors are in a little range the part is good to be assembled. Left and right suspensions for this reason can't be precisely the same so, from the factory, one can have a camber degree and the other a different one if the dot or the arrow on the bolt are in the same positions. I don't have to tell you that also weight distribution is different from FL and FR wheels and this will be enought to understand why different regulations are used to get the right and needed setup = marks on bolts can be in different clock positions and all can be fine.

Now, the best part is that we are inside a forum, so I'm sure I don't have damaged anything and, after reading, you can still believe I'm wrong and you are not. People will follow what make sense for them.

 

found this on evo x service manual.. no further info though..

 

Fede -

Thanks for the high-school physics lesson and the pop-psych advice.

The key to what I've been saying is really quite simple: don't work on the car unless you know not only how to work on cars but also how the particular car is made. And, as suggested in the above post, the best way to know how the car is made is to look at the FSM. This will tell you that we have remove-flip-and-reinstall camber bolts and that the dot tells you which way they are currently installed. If you know cars well, you can also tell this from the design of the head of camber bolt, but that might be asking too much.

As to my tone, I often lose it when people spout utter nonsense on the web. I cannot stop them from posting it, but I can punish said behavior to reduce the likelihood of it happening again. In "real life," I study the effects of old-school classical and operant conditioning on complex human behavior, so it's not just me flailing at a world I cannot control (with apologies here for my seeing your high-school physics lesson and raising you with a college-level psychology lecture). Stuff like "the dots are so Mitsu can void your warranty" is the kind of thing that really sets my off. I'm not even sure where people get these ideas.