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The reason why I was thinking that a higher ride height was the possible culprit for your lack of front neg camber is because you'd mentioned Shine springs. The Shine ethos was about running the front higher than most. This was to keep the lower control arms/wishbones at an angle where they were either level or with the ball joint side slightly lower than the inboard pivot. This kind of geometry keeps the roll centre higher (closer to the centre of gravity) and results in a car with high geometric roll stiffness which means it resists roll due to good geometry rather than really high elastic stiffness eg springs or bars. Its a good way to make fast road cars. The other positive spin offs of running this way is that usually your steering arms will sit more level too which minimises bump steer compared to very low cars where the car will toe out on bump and just be plain scary if it happens mid corner. However your ride height doesn't look high because your control arms are more or less level. You have a choice re camber. You could lower the car more which will give you some more static neg camber, but you'd knowingly be moving your roll centre down so you'd have to run very stiff to counter that, and at the same time you'd mess up your steering arm angles. Regardless of what spring rates you throw at it you have it at a pretty optimum height judging by the control arm angles. So to get it really cornering you'd need more camber in the ways we said above.
What I said before about drive shaft stretch: My mod I did to my lower control arms was to modify them so that TT ball joints would fit inside them. These corrected the roll centre ( I could run about 10mm lower without changing the factory level lower control arm geometry) but also had elongated slots in them that gave me the ability to effectively lengthen the control arm to give more neg camber. In going from OEM neg 1 degree camber to neg 2/1/4 though I have lengthened the lower control arm by about 10mm. So if the control arm gets longer, so to the driveshaft has to extend to accommodate that and it does that by the ball/knuckes inside the CV's and inners sliding apart. I thought maybe you'd be running driveshaft angles that had the arm sloping down diagonally. Pythagorus's theorem and all that stuff but that kind of angle would be slightly elongating a driveshaft and then if you go and slide the ball joints outward a further 10mm then that driveshaft mech can get into an operating range that its not built for. That's what I was referring to. But from the pic your driveshaft angles are close to level (driveshaft mechs are in a more compressed state than if the car was at full droop) so you could probably get away with such a mod.
It seems you may have been thinking about TT spindles/hubs which is a bit different to TT ball joints that I had mentioned. I don't know a lot about it but from what I can gather early TT spindles were a good mod because they gave good camber gain. What this means is that for each degree of roll of the car, the geometries that the spindle induce are better able to maintain or actually increase the neg camber on the outside front tyre or at least for a bit longer than normal hubs. Standard run of the mill spindles have poor camber gain so as you push it and the car starts to roll, the outside front will quickly eat through any static camber it may have had and start to go positive. Considering that most people run the latter sort of spindle, that's why its important to not go mental with your lowering. You may gain static neg camber that way but the car will only have to roll a couple of degrees (which it will do easily because you've mashed the roll centre geometries) and it will all be gone. eg. Because you've set the car up to always run right on this threshold it can go bad very quickly. But if the car has better control arm angles to begin with its sort of like buying yourself time (or a bit more roll) before the neg camber you have gets eaten up and starts to go turd. The caveat to that is you can run knowingly low and run really stiff springs to negate the roll from being a factor but unless you have some seriously trick damping it will ride horribly on the street and at any rate your steering will probably be terrible.
You're mk4 golf aren't you. I believe K mac make infinitely adjustable camber/caster top plates. One of their selling points for my car was that they do not alter the strut height which may or may not be the case with yours. You're looking at $500+ for those though.
What I said before about drive shaft stretch: My mod I did to my lower control arms was to modify them so that TT ball joints would fit inside them. These corrected the roll centre ( I could run about 10mm lower without changing the factory level lower control arm geometry) but also had elongated slots in them that gave me the ability to effectively lengthen the control arm to give more neg camber. In going from OEM neg 1 degree camber to neg 2/1/4 though I have lengthened the lower control arm by about 10mm. So if the control arm gets longer, so to the driveshaft has to extend to accommodate that and it does that by the ball/knuckes inside the CV's and inners sliding apart. I thought maybe you'd be running driveshaft angles that had the arm sloping down diagonally. Pythagorus's theorem and all that stuff but that kind of angle would be slightly elongating a driveshaft and then if you go and slide the ball joints outward a further 10mm then that driveshaft mech can get into an operating range that its not built for. That's what I was referring to. But from the pic your driveshaft angles are close to level (driveshaft mechs are in a more compressed state than if the car was at full droop) so you could probably get away with such a mod.
It seems you may have been thinking about TT spindles/hubs which is a bit different to TT ball joints that I had mentioned. I don't know a lot about it but from what I can gather early TT spindles were a good mod because they gave good camber gain. What this means is that for each degree of roll of the car, the geometries that the spindle induce are better able to maintain or actually increase the neg camber on the outside front tyre or at least for a bit longer than normal hubs. Standard run of the mill spindles have poor camber gain so as you push it and the car starts to roll, the outside front will quickly eat through any static camber it may have had and start to go positive. Considering that most people run the latter sort of spindle, that's why its important to not go mental with your lowering. You may gain static neg camber that way but the car will only have to roll a couple of degrees (which it will do easily because you've mashed the roll centre geometries) and it will all be gone. eg. Because you've set the car up to always run right on this threshold it can go bad very quickly. But if the car has better control arm angles to begin with its sort of like buying yourself time (or a bit more roll) before the neg camber you have gets eaten up and starts to go turd. The caveat to that is you can run knowingly low and run really stiff springs to negate the roll from being a factor but unless you have some seriously trick damping it will ride horribly on the street and at any rate your steering will probably be terrible.
You're mk4 golf aren't you. I believe K mac make infinitely adjustable camber/caster top plates. One of their selling points for my car was that they do not alter the strut height which may or may not be the case with yours. You're looking at $500+ for those though.
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