DIY adjustable camber ball joints mod

[sambb]

1. audi TT ball joints #8J0407365 & ..366 or Meyle equivalent #1160100022

2. There are 3 ball joint locating dimples. Drill them out. Their internal remains will need to be filed dead flat. Not fun.

3. Shocking photo but this is what the dimples look like on the inside. I had a second set of control arms so did it in a bench vice with a file. Its feasible you could do it in the car with the strut pushed out of the way if you could fit a small dremel bit up there. Either way this part of it is a pain.

4. The internal faces have to be dead smooth. No relic of the dimples or anything otherwise the ball joint will not slide in.

5. Lucky for us the outside two bolt holes line up. Place the new ball joint onto the top of the control arm in the fully out position. Make sure the left side control arm is getting drilled with the left side ball joint. The ball joint socket is staggered forward towards the front of the car for more castor if they are not marked. Then mark where the new centre hole has to go and drill it. Do not oversize it drastically as the new hole sits very close to the old hole and you don't want them to run into each other.

6. I think I drilled it 9mm so that there was some wriggle room in case the castor needed to be evened up. The top holes I left alone.

7. I then took a file to the ball joints already elongated holes. Guys with mk 2 fabias that use these ball joint get there stock neg camber taken from 1 degree to 1/1/2 degree if they are put straight on. I decided to elongate the ball joint holes to get that bit extra if I need it. These joint will still be stronger when adjusted fully out since the centre hole is a full 10mm deeper into the control arm than stock. The hole on the bottom has been taken out with a round file.

8. This is the fully in position.

This is the fully out position. So theres 10mm of adjustment, and from a quick look these ball joints sit the stub 15mm further out to begin with so there should hopefully be up to 2 degrees of neg max. I just hope that if I loose castor it isn't too much, and there is also enough wriggle room to square up the castors on each side.

9. - I got this idea from seeing guys do it on Fabia mk 2's where it bolts onto the top of the control arm. Fabia mk1's share our control arm. The ball joints for mk1 and mk2's share the same part #. Therefore if these joints fit ok into mk1 and mk2 fabia hubs then they should fit into ours. If they don't then I filed my hands to the bone for nothing and went public with my stuff up.

10............ i'll keep you posted after I do the fit up and alignment.

[Eddy]

Hoyhoy.

Me like.

[sambb]

yeah well now I'm starting to think I'm a dill for not first knocking out the originals and confirming these would fit first, but hopefully I'm just paranoid.
Eddy maybe you know - how do our driveshafts fit into the gearbox and hub? Considering that I'm moving the hub out maybe 20mm+, is at least one side of the driveshaft on sliding splines so that I don't pull on any flanges/bearings/CV's?

[Eddy]

Hoyhoy.

Sam, not too sure on the hub end, the gearbox end is straight forward. I have to the CV's one day, so might find out more then I suppose.
She just sits in the shed under cover these days.

[vwthunder]

Awesome

Was thinking of doing this ages ago, but thought it might end in tears

Interested to see how it goes and drives etc

[guile]

nice bit of home grown engineering, good work on detailing the steps and taking time to post up photos...

[Notso Swift]

Pretty common tweek in circuit racing, especially production based classes, longevity will not be a problem

[sambb]

good to hear re longevity. I was surprised how soft the ball joint flange material was to file when I was elongating the slots. It was literally just 5 minutes per slot. I guess its just cast which had me thinking about flex. But the flange is so much broader than the original and really fills out the inside of the control arm so it should be fine. I'm just getting the oem front bushes out now ready for my superpro's to swap in. I forgot what a turd job that is.

[seangti]

So the drive shaft to the gearbox has 6 bolts to keep it in, and the hub end has a long bolt that "pulls" the shaft into the hub with splines on it. If the hub is 2cm further out (so wider track width), that isn't going to work. The control arms are quite soft, so the additional width causes significant load and the drive shaft won't mate to the hub properly, it would end up not fitting snug and again add greater load on the splines within the assembly. Not sure if that all makes sense... The more I think about it, I'm struggling to see how it's all going to bolt together safely.

But I'm very risk averse when it comes to this stuff...

[sambb]

Update - the standard bolts are not long enough. The ball joint flange of the audi TT RS assembly is a little fatter than stock I presume. I lost access to just enough threads on the bolt to make it a bit dubious so I went with slightly longer 8mm bolts.