mx5cartalk.com

My NA is fitted with Koni shocks and King springs (came with car when I bought it), which from the look of it sit on the lowest setting. The problem this gives me is that when I take it in for an alignment, I'm told they can't bring the rear cambers in to less than 1.5deg left and 2deg right, which is more than what I want (after about 1deg each side on the rears), and is giving me horrible tyre wear, and not ideal for the handling.

So I'm wondering if there is a different kind of fitting I can use for the rear camber that will allow greater adjustment, or if I need to raise up the suspension to bring the cambers in. I don't actually know how to raise the suspension, but I wouldn't mind doing it regardless, car is probably a touch low, and looks about 30-40mm lower than stock.

1.5 to 2 degrees negative on the rear shouldn't give you horrible tyre wear. I'm running 2 degrees negative (admittedly on a NC) and over 35,000 kilometres the insides were only worn about 1mm more than the outside.

Your shocks may be past their used by date and this is the reason for poor handling and tyre wear.

Measure the distance between the centre of the wheel vertically to the lip of the guard and get back to us. Do the fronts as well.

After that we can tell you what the correct camber settings should be to match the height of the car.

I run -1.8 deg at the rear of my car, the tyre wear is fairly fairly even... I would at least get them to match the setting rather than have a .5 deg difference on each side. That could help the handling. What is the toe set at?

The tyre wear could be due to your car being a 1.8 turbo

Raising the car is relatively easy. There should be 3 grooves machined into the damper body. A circlip is fitted into one of the grooves and the bottom spring seat rests on the circlip. To raise the car you just move the circlip up to the next groove up the shock body until you get to the setting you require. I've read that the top groove is standard height (if you had standard springs), the middle groove is the height the Clubmans used and the bottom groove is a lowered setting. I'm assuming it's set on the lowest groove now. There are methods online on how to do this with everything still fitted to the car but I'd suggest the safest way to do it is to remove the spring/damper unit from the car and use spring compressors to compress the spring then move the circlip.