Quote:
Originally Posted by mwebb
it is very common
for me to see lowered cars with smoked tires , smoked on the inside ... without the follow up of correctly adjusting the camber back to where the specification shows that it belongs
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In general, the toe angle (which is adjustable on the front of all cars that I know of, and adjustable to at least some extent on the rear of almost all) causes more problems than camber does. Unless you wind up with more than around 3 degrees of negative camber, you get fairly little extra wear.
I have about 15 years of driving on cars that have about 2 degrees negative camber (a bit more on the drive wheels, a bit less on the non-drive ones) in two different types of cars (two examples each); one with a MacPherson front and semi-trailing arm rear and one with double wishbones all the way around. Neither one exhibited more than a very little bit of "camber wear". I know people with more who also have not seen odd wear.
Toe-out can completely obliterate the inside edge of a tire. The tires that came on my first car of the four I mention above were shredded. The inside corners had been ground off to the point where the ends of the wires that make up the steel belts were sticking out of where the tread used to be! (I should have gotten it aligned when I bought the car.) The car didn't have much camber, but it had a lot of toe out. After the alignment, which set the rears up to toe-in slightly and gave me some negative camber, the wear was fine and the handling a whole lot better.
-soD