So I switched to coilovers and 255 tires on my stock bbs wheels. Everything fit fine except the passenger rear wheel. It's slightly touching the coilovers, all the other wheels/tires have about 4mm of clearance. I'm not really sure why only the 1 wheel is not working, can this just be tolerance differences from side to side? Never had a major impact on that wheel, with the exception curbing it once like 5 years ago. Anyone have any ideas?
Nothing looks bent, and if the lateral links were bent, wouldn't that give me MORE strut to wheel clearance, not less? As for the alignment, that wheel does have more negative camber for some reason, but it's not adjustable. Should I just get some camber bolts or am I just putting a band-aid on a much bigger issue.
An alignment is not a bandaid. If anything, it sounds like it's the main cause(besides the fact that you ballooned a tire on your 8" wheel). Camber bolts and re-align to a more performance oriented alignment. I suggest comething like -1 fr and 0 rear or -1.5 fr and -.5 rear, you may have issues with the fronts rubbing with to much neg camber.
I have camber plates on all 4 corners, so changing the camber that way shouldn't cause any rubbing as it won't be changing the strut to wheel distance. However, to solve my current issue, I guess I would have to either go with a camber bolt or adjustable lateral links.
Depends if the douche who towed the car hooked a lateral link when tying it down on the roll back. That's the main reason they get bent so if in the past it's been towed look there first. Just a scenario...
Never had the car towed since I bought it new in 06, of course, that doesn't rule out the scenario when it was delivered to the dealer. I guess I'll double check everything tonight to make absolutely sure that nothing is bent.
Have you swapped the passenger front wheel to this location to rule out whether or not your wheel is "off"? Might as well start ruling bits out.
I run -3 all the way around on my camber with no issues. on 235/45/18 Sounds like the OP has something bent
Have put the car on a lift or on stands? You should be able to compare right and left a bit easier, without load on them.
I checked both sides when it was up in the air, but I can do it again to make sure. I just checked the lateral links and they are not bent. At this point I'm ready to say its just tolerance difference from side to side, it is only just a 3mm difference afterall, and get a camber bolt in there to fix it :|. I do have the rear subframe locking bolts installed, maybe that shifted the assembly slightly?:dunno
i had a bent strut on the forester, apparently it had been bent for awhile and it just progressively got worse. but initially it was so slight that you couldn't see anything. it started out that i noticed that the tire rubbed the strut, then it got so bad that i heard a metal on metal sound when the corner was unloaded...it was rubbing on the wheel. switched out to a new strut and voila, no more scrubbing
Finally figured it out! Apparently theres more slack between the lower struts bolts and the hub than I thought. I loosened them and gave it a good tug and voila, there was the 4mm of clearance I had on all the other wheels. So i did a simple calculation, basically there's enough play there to give you +-0.5 degrees of camber.