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Steering going off-center

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Location
Palm City
#1
Ever since the monkeys at the alignment shop touched my car, I noticed that whenever I take a hard turn, I can feel some slight slippage in the steering wheel, and the wheel will be stuck in that direction slightly. If it's cocked to the left, I can take a hard turn to the right to bring it back to center and vice versa.

Haven't had the car on the lift yet. Obviously something is loose but I wanted to see what to look for.
 


RAAMaudio

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#2
You called it right, monkeys at the shop which is not a nice thing to relate to monkeys as they just do as they are, not half assed like the majority of "alignment" shops.

The two biggest issues are that stock specs are not very precise, you can be in spec and have a pretty bad alignment and certainly not optimized for performance and then how they do the work as I have personally seen far more times that I wish I had.

This is a performance car, pay for a performance alignment which you might have to dig to find somebody competent enough to do it or DIY, which is not that costly or hard to do when you learn a bit about it)
 


OP
M
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Palm City
Thread Starter #3
I had to go back and bitch at them, but I ended up with decent specs. But now that my steering is "slipping" I'm not sure it's even in spec any more. Any idea what could be loose to cause the wheel to move off center during hard turns?
 


Messages
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Location
Metro Detroit
#4
Whatever they touched is the problem. Now they just have to admit what they did. My hunch is they forgot to tighten one of the strut-to-knuckle bolts.
 


OP
M
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Palm City
Thread Starter #5
I already went back once after the steering wheel went about 90* crooked after the first turn I took. That was 2 weeks ago and now it's showing symptoms to a lesser degree. I'll figure it out myself; they're never touching my car again.
 


jeffreylyon

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#6
Before I installed the PM 6-point brace I would normally tweak the steering back and forth a couple of degrees after each autocross run. I could even reset it to 0 degrees by throwing the car in one direction or the other after the a/c event. I tried tightening up the cross-member bolts and, on a good run, I could still tweak the steering. When I installed the brace I found that the whole cross member was shifted a good 1/2" back and to the left. Because the 6-point does a great job aligning the cross-member to the chassis I haven't had a problem since.

I wonder if the shop you used attempted to set camber by shifting the cross-member and didn't re-tighten the bolts well enough. There are four pairs, one above the LCA, once further aft, one on the cross-member to a straight bracket to the fourth on the chassis. The 6-point brace ties the 3 rear-most pairs together with the front of the LCAs and aligns the cross-member in the chassis by eliminating the loose straight brackets.

Obviously I'm pretty happy with the brace - no problems since and noticeably sharper turn-in.
 


OP
M
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Location
Palm City
Thread Starter #7
Whatever they touched is the problem. Now they just have to admit what they did. My hunch is they forgot to tighten one of the strut-to-knuckle bolts.
Your hunch was correct. Got it up on the lift this morning and a few of the strut-to-knuckle bolts needed a few more turns to be fully tightened. No more steering slippage is felt...wonder how much this threw off my alignment. I'll find out this week.
 


jeffreylyon

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#8
Why would they touch those bolts? I can't remember - do the stock struts have slotted holes for camber adjustment?
 


OP
M
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Palm City
Thread Starter #9
That's the only place to really get any camber adjustment with the factory setup.

I have the XTA coilovers, but I didn't want to drill out the strut towers to access the camber adjustments...yet.
 


RAAMaudio

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#10
Glad you found it.

You can use camber bolts which provide a bit of wedge in one direction to keep them from slipping again. I have not had mine slip even with wide super sticky tires but I had an issue on another car on track and I ended up going to the extreme of tack welding the struts to the knuckles as it was the only thing that seemed to work. Not that big a deal when I could cut them loose in a couple of minutes and tack them back up when done. That was when I had all my tools, lift, etc...now it is all in storage but I can use shims if it happens on this car.
 




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