I was always told that an alignment doesn't affect your ride height but recently I went for an alignment and after taking some negative camber out of the rear, the rear sits higher than it used to. By that I mean there is visually a lot more wheel gap than there was before. Does this make sense? My car was tucking before the alignment and now has a 1 finger gap.

Can anyone explain to me how that makes sense? I'm on BC BRs with SPC rear camber arm and toe bolt.

 

did they jack up the car at all? I find the springs take a little bit to settle every time I jack the car up and set it back down. It doesn't last long, but immediately after dropping it back down the car will sit a little higher. An alignment by itself would not noticeably increase wheel gap.

 

Sure. If the tire is sitting at a 89 or 87 degree angle instead of 90 degrees ride height will be different. How much? Less than you can measure.

And now a word from the guy who has been following me for years. I keep telling him no you cannot touch my pee pee but he just doesn't pay attention.

 

Optical illusion, and an ever so slight difference.

 

Well then my car is an exception because my ride height is noticeably higher now. I can't explain why but it's definitely the case.

 

The "higher" you see is the wheel not almost touching the fender anymore.

How much camber did they take out?

 

Any changes in the situation? I'm in for updates...

 

Shouldn't affect your ride height enough to where it would be that noticeable...

 

Well the fact of the matter is that it does. I went to get the alignment fine tuned yesterday and I actually looked at the tires as he adjusted it and you can actually see the ride height shift ever so slightly as he does it. Call me crazy but I saw it with my own eyes. The fact that my alignment went from way off to within spec I'm pretty was enough to increase ride height to a noticeable point the first time. The second time around with minor adjustments, it didn't affect it much.

 

More negative camber will reduce wheel gap but keep ride height the same.

Wheel gap does not equal ride height.

 

Can you explain to me why camber reduces or increases wheel gap though? I'm in for an explanation because I always thought it had no bearing on it.

 

you are changing the angle of the tire from the bottom, this will have a minor effect on height of tire, key word is minor. or it will increase the distance of the fender to sidewall of tire if you are slammed, this will be more noticeable

 

I think I was misusing the term ride height, that I'm referring to is wheel gap. From what I can see removing negative camber definitely does increase wheel gap. Obviously it's not by much but when you're slammed like I am, every little difference is very noticeable.

 

I recently took out almost all the negative camber in the rear (spc camber arms), the car looks like it sits an inch higher than it did before .

 

^ Kk. I just set the front and the rear evenly and the car sits only a bit off but the corners that have more camber sit lower so at least I know that's normal and once I fix the camber issue it'll sit evenly again.