Steering wheel not straight - tracking?

[Ally]

OK, fitted coilovers last week and now my steering wheel is sitting slightly to the left when the front wheels are in the straight-ahead position. I've not had the alignment/tracking/camber set up yet (giving it a couple of hundred miles to settle and decide on my final ride height).

Q1: Will adjusting the tracking sort out the steering wheel position?

Q2: I was thinking I could remove the wheel and reposition it a spline of 2 differently, but AFAIK 172 steering wheels only fit on in one position (not uniform splines). Is this true?

Q3: Sort of related, how much camber do H&Rs give as standard? I'm worried it's too much for road use and will kill my tyres prematurely!

Cheers
Ally

 

[tim124]

Q1, yeah adjust it at the track rod ends. wind one in and one out

Q2 if you reposition the wheel you can mess up the indicator canceling i think...

Q3. dont know

 

[Turkish]

1. yes.

2. wheel will only fit on one way so you cant take it off and move it round a spline to solve the offset wheel.

3. will depend on the height you have them set. On my 172 it was about -1.5 degrees but i forget how it was on the 182. Anything upto about -2 is fine for road use tbh.

 

[Ally]

Ta! Think I'll leave the adjusting of the track rod ends to the garage when I put it in for checking, get it done properly.

I've not gone that low with them: 600mm front and 600mm rear (ground to top of wheel arch, measured through centre of wheel). I think that's about 30mm front and 25mm rear lower than standard (but I might go slightly lower). Not got a clue what the camber is now but it looked visibly more than Rory182's uncupped-182 when we compared yesterday (but could just have been us imagining that...). I'm not really intending taking it on track so was thinking about -1.0 to -1.5 would be about right. I'll see what it measures before I look at correction bolts I think.

Ally

 

[Turkish]

Yeah thats the best bet, have a look at the values when the geometry gets set. If it looks too high then consider camber bolts but if its about -1 to -2 i wouldnt bother personally.

 

[Ally]

Cheers again Loony. I've got an idea of what I'm wanting the geometry set to so I'll see how things go.

I'm starting to get an understanding of the more technical aspects of suspension eventually...