DIY adjustable camber ball joints mod

[sambb]

1. audi TT ball joints #8J0407365 & ..366 or Meyle equivalent #1160100022

2. There are 3 ball joint locating dimples. Drill them out. Their internal remains will need to be filed dead flat. Not fun.

3. Shocking photo but this is what the dimples look like on the inside. I had a second set of control arms so did it in a bench vice with a file. Its feasible you could do it in the car with the strut pushed out of the way if you could fit a small dremel bit up there. Either way this part of it is a pain.

4. The internal faces have to be dead smooth. No relic of the dimples or anything otherwise the ball joint will not slide in.

5. Lucky for us the outside two bolt holes line up. Place the new ball joint onto the top of the control arm in the fully out position. Make sure the left side control arm is getting drilled with the left side ball joint. The ball joint socket is staggered forward towards the front of the car for more castor if they are not marked. Then mark where the new centre hole has to go and drill it. Do not oversize it drastically as the new hole sits very close to the old hole and you don't want them to run into each other.

6. I think I drilled it 9mm so that there was some wriggle room in case the castor needed to be evened up. The top holes I left alone.

7. I then took a file to the ball joints already elongated holes. Guys with mk 2 fabias that use these ball joint get there stock neg camber taken from 1 degree to 1/1/2 degree if they are put straight on. I decided to elongate the ball joint holes to get that bit extra if I need it. These joint will still be stronger when adjusted fully out since the centre hole is a full 10mm deeper into the control arm than stock. The hole on the bottom has been taken out with a round file.

8. This is the fully in position.

This is the fully out position. So theres 10mm of adjustment, and from a quick look these ball joints sit the stub 15mm further out to begin with so there should hopefully be up to 2 degrees of neg max. I just hope that if I loose castor it isn't too much, and there is also enough wriggle room to square up the castors on each side.

9. - I got this idea from seeing guys do it on Fabia mk 2's where it bolts onto the top of the control arm. Fabia mk1's share our control arm. The ball joints for mk1 and mk2's share the same part #. Therefore if these joints fit ok into mk1 and mk2 fabia hubs then they should fit into ours. If they don't then I filed my hands to the bone for nothing and went public with my stuff up.

10............ i'll keep you posted after I do the fit up and alignment.

[Eddy]

Hoyhoy.

Me like.

[sambb]

yeah well now I'm starting to think I'm a dill for not first knocking out the originals and confirming these would fit first, but hopefully I'm just paranoid.
Eddy maybe you know - how do our driveshafts fit into the gearbox and hub? Considering that I'm moving the hub out maybe 20mm+, is at least one side of the driveshaft on sliding splines so that I don't pull on any flanges/bearings/CV's?

[Eddy]

Hoyhoy.

Sam, not too sure on the hub end, the gearbox end is straight forward. I have to the CV's one day, so might find out more then I suppose.
She just sits in the shed under cover these days.

[vwthunder]

Awesome

Was thinking of doing this ages ago, but thought it might end in tears

Interested to see how it goes and drives etc

[guile]

nice bit of home grown engineering, good work on detailing the steps and taking time to post up photos...

[Notso Swift]

Pretty common tweek in circuit racing, especially production based classes, longevity will not be a problem

[sambb]

good to hear re longevity. I was surprised how soft the ball joint flange material was to file when I was elongating the slots. It was literally just 5 minutes per slot. I guess its just cast which had me thinking about flex. But the flange is so much broader than the original and really fills out the inside of the control arm so it should be fine. I'm just getting the oem front bushes out now ready for my superpro's to swap in. I forgot what a turd job that is.

[seangti]

So the drive shaft to the gearbox has 6 bolts to keep it in, and the hub end has a long bolt that "pulls" the shaft into the hub with splines on it. If the hub is 2cm further out (so wider track width), that isn't going to work. The control arms are quite soft, so the additional width causes significant load and the drive shaft won't mate to the hub properly, it would end up not fitting snug and again add greater load on the splines within the assembly. Not sure if that all makes sense... The more I think about it, I'm struggling to see how it's all going to bolt together safely.

But I'm very risk averse when it comes to this stuff...

[sambb]

Update - the standard bolts are not long enough. The ball joint flange of the audi TT RS assembly is a little fatter than stock I presume. I lost access to just enough threads on the bolt to make it a bit dubious so I went with slightly longer 8mm bolts.

[sambb]

Thanks Sean. The driveshaft has to have sliding lateral play built into it somewhere. Between full droop and full compression the distance from the gearbox to the hub has to change. I just hope that since I'm running at stock ride height that there are enough degrees of freedom available to me. Because I'm moving outward there won't be a situation where I'm ever compressing the driveshaft between the hub and gearbox more than standard, but I'm a little worried about whether or not there will be issues at full extension. What I'm doing is the opposite of camber adjustment at the strut top. Moving the strut in at the top tilts/pushes the hub further in against the driveshaft. I haven't heard of anyone on here striking problems with driveshaft compression and that's on some pretty low/neg cambered cars, so if it was ok in that direction I hope I have the same amount of room in the other. I will try to find out what the max camber adjustment is, but I'll be running it no more than 1.75 degrees if that's possible so I'm not doing anything outlandish. She'll be right.
I'm not worried about the ball joints being strong in the control arm. Even when they are in the fully out position the centre bolt sits much further inside the control arm than the standard one did which would spread the loads nicely. There was nothing special about the way the stock ball joint fit into the control arm. The dimples were just guides that assisted in getting the bolt holes lined up and were not structural to the control arm or the ball joint mounting in any way. The stockers just slid into a void and were tightened down and so are these ones. The control arm is swiss chees as it is - all its strength comes from the shape of its pressed ridges and curves. One extra hole drilled for the centre bolt isn't going to compromise anything.

as it stands the issues are
- will the stub fit the hub (that's make or break)
- what effect will it have on castor

but if anyone has a diagram of how the driveshaft - CV -hub connection is fitted then I'd love to see it.

[seangti]

-1.75 degrees of camber is not enough to make a noticeable difference to cornering performance. It's not enough to balance tyre wear either, you'll still wear the outside of the tyre a lot. I'm running -3.5 on my left, -2.5 on the right (as I run right handed circuits), and it's my shoulders that show more signs of wear.

I initially went more conservative at around -2.2 deg each side, but still had high shoulder wear so leaned em in more. I've now maxed out the left side... unless I cut the strut tops and go all engineering on them.

[sambb]

Good to know. To be honest I'm a bit torn on how much i'll need. If I was going on a circuit I'd be shooting for 2+ but with the open diff and going uphills, I think i'll compromise forward traction if I get up into 2 degrees territory. That might not be the case since I do run 50 profile semi's but I'm just not sure. A lot of the guys overseas road reg class guys don't go over 2 degrees so I was just going to follow suit. Just not sure really. As a rule if you add steering axis inclination (which happens automatically with our strut - you can't adjust the hub separately to the steering axis) then you need to add castor with it. So if what I've done takes away some castor then I won't go nuts with the camber but if I get more castor then I'll feel a bit better about adding more camber with it.

[vwthunder]

Did i miss something, do you not have camber strut tops, isn't that easier than playing around and drilling into your control arms and putting more stress on other components ?

Looks like you are building a race car

[sambb]

No I have standard tops. I looked into tops and the money was outlandish when I could basically achieve the exact same thing at the base instead. I could do the work myself and it hasn't cost me more than 180 bucks. Provided the stubs fit the hub it will work. Stuff like this is sold for just about every VW hatch except ours and the fabia mk2 guys have been doing this mod all over the world. It could be an issue but I doubt there'll be any drive shaft problems - so I just figured I'd make some. Like I said earlier I'm not after big camber numbers, just whats going to be effective on the hillclimbs - it still has to get the power down when the car gets straightened up. Plus its camber that increases front track, if it works its gotta be betterer.