DIY adjustable camber ball joints mod

[Martin]

sorry some pics seem to have not loaded from earlier. The main one is the one here that shows the physical size difference between the OEM and Audi TT joint.

The Audi TT version is huge - awesome

[Martin]

Martin you said earlier that you run 195's when we were talking about staggered set ups. Wasn't sure if you meant that you run staggered with 195's on the back or if you were just saying that that's what you run all round?

Same all round - my point was that I'm running 195 on a 6.5" rim so it's very likely that a 185 would fit a 6.5" rim

[sambb]

As another option if someones ever wants to go down this path, superpro do these adjustable ball joints that apparently roll centre correct too. They are for Octavias, mk 5 Golfs etc. I'd considered them but they didn't appear to have the same offset in the joint position for camber and castor as the Audi ones and I had no idea how the bolt holes lined up relative to ours, whereas I had a pretty good idea that the Audi ones were close to ours because of the work Fabia Mk 2 guys had done to get them to fit on the top of their control arms.
They are $220 for the pair from bursons.
Another option anyway.

http://www.superpro.com.au/find/roll...999500971/vid-

[sambb]

major potential problem avoided. Was coming home from work this morning crawling along because a patrolman was behind me and suddenly I start to hear this knocking sound. It was loud and felt like it was coming from the passenger footwell. Of course major stress sets in. Happens if rolling, accelerating, clutch in or clutch out. Passed the CV test. I'm thinking Faaaaarrrrrrkkk I have pulled a driveshaft. Not much to see at 4.30am and of course zero day sleep after my nightshift. With it playing on my mind and an event next weekend, I waited till the kids went out and got it up on stands and it won't do it running with the wheels in the air and driveshafts extended even further - nothings loaded though so don't feel any better. Check every bolt, go over every detail of the control arm/ball joint thing and then there it is..... My droplink connection to the FARB was loose-ish. It must have finally back off enough to make the noise on the crappy jointed concrete road I was on. It still needed a spanner on it to turn, not finger tight but felt like it had only been nipped up. This is the second time the ball joint on the whiteline adjustable drop links has backed off like that. anyone else had that?
Still stressing that that surely couldn't be it, I went for a drive and sure enough zero knocking. I've had standard drop links go before that sounded nothing like that. Major sigh of relief. I really thought I'd f&*$k something. I can do massive jobs at work and not even worry but its amazing how your mind can tie itself in knots when you've done something irreversible to your car and a sound appears.
All good... back on track.... pedders tomorrow morning. And bed for me now.

[guile]

at least you found it mate, well done. i had a similar thing with my vwr drop links and ended up getting some spacers made to space the ball joint off the shock for better alignment of the drop link...

hope that makes sense, not sure if it would help your situation or not though without looking at it...

[sambb]

yeah its a funny design. Instead of a large flat surface that butts up against the face of the FARB it has a small conical shaped bit behind the last threads that sort of feeds into the hole in the bar.and just a small suface area that meets the bar. Might have to go to nordlocks. I know what you mean, things aren't exactly perpendicular the way the droplink lines up with the bar. ill figure something out.

[sambb]

So I got the alignment done today so that the car is ready for the weekend. Before I went down I dug out my last alignment printout and was a bit disappointed to see that my castor is actually 4/1/2 degrees not the 5/1/2 degrees that I for some reason thought it was. From what I can gather when I move my offset rear control arm bushes to the castor position I should get nearly an additional degree so in my mind I must have been already mistakenly operating on that number.
Anyway so with the audi ball joints in I haven't lost any significant castor - looks like I lost 8 minutes so no biggy and a big relief because I was worried I may have lost a significant amount.
The range of adjustment in the ball joint slots from fully in to fully out is a about half a degree.
The starting fully in position is roughly 1/1/2 degrees negative which is half a degree greater than standard, and the fully out position is roughly 2 degrees which is a degree greater than standard.
Given that I had only 4/1/2 degrees of castor, have a fair amount of sidewall wear and have an event coming up I decided to go with 2 degrees negative.
The plan for the next few weeks is to press out my rear LCA's from the "anti dive" position they are in and run them in the castor position so that I can get the castor maxed out, and then get the thing down to Heasmans and get everything adjusted - subframes via the eccentric bolts and ball joints to get everything spot on. This appears pretty necessary because to achieve 2 degrees negative per side, one ball joint was nearly all the way out but the other was nearly all the way in, which definitely suggests that to get the most out of it (looks like there could be a touch more) the subframes and joints will have to be done at the same time. That was too big a job for today though.
First impressions are that you can really see the extra 20+mm track width. At pedestrian speeds the steering weight seems slightly lighter. Since I haven't lost castor it can't be that so its more than likely the way the extra camber is playing out. I guess its also possible that the lower ball joint position has subtley altered the scrub radius slightly. On stock ET43's this would likely make the scrub axis less negative which might account for it. Turn in was definitely better but I couldn't lean on it because unfortunately it was a wet peak hour drive home.
I'm going to have to fit my wheel spacers before the weekend just to check that the track width isn't to ridiculously wide with them on (now it'll be 60+mm extra) to pass scrutineering for type 1 class. Its possible we may get a dry track this sunday so when I'm running hard with a substantially wider front track , a higher roll centre and 2 degrees of negative, then that will be the real test and hopefully I can beat my last time there.

[Martin]

With the superloy control arms I have almost 1 deg camber range

Adjusting camber at the lower strut mount has the widest range, 1~1.5mm = 1 deg!
Adjusting at the ball joint needs more travel to achieve the same thing
Adjusting at the top of the strut needs a lot of movement to achieve the same thing (like 10~15mm = 1 deg)

2 degrees will definitely be fun, I'm sure you'll be pleased and will go faster

Certainly sounds like there is an opportunity to get another 0.5 deg out of it (at a cost)

The lighter steering will be due to the reduced scrub raduis
The scrub radius will however increase when you put the spacers on, you'll get some feel/weight back

[sambb]

To be honest given the amount the ball joint was offset compared to the standard one I did think there would be more negative camber to be had. But like you said once the subframes are adjusted properly not just to square things up like they had been it should be more like 2/1/4 to 2/1/2 which i'll be happy with for if ever I hit the circuit. But for the time being 2 degrees is heaps.
For a long time I'd been thinking about how to adapt proper extended ball joints to a flange that I could fit with no luck, so to get some roll centre correction out of these audi joints was an absolute bonus. That may turn out to be one of the biggest benefits. I agree with you - the more I think about it I reckon the joint location has tended the scrub more towards centre point steering on the ET43's which is why it feels lighter. If that's true then when the spacers go on though , which I'm pretty sure had already moved the scrub right out to positive scrub, like you say the steering will be even more positive, so I hope I pick up even more steering feel and it should get heavier again - hopefully haha.

[vwthunder]

Someone needs to make some adjustable control arms, guessing it wouldn't be cheap, but would be a well worth modification.

Im sure a few on here would be interested, hardest part i think would be with the rear bush and getting something to mount into it.
The MK4 looks like a better design