wandering car??

[BT4]

by the way, the AVO bushings caused more NVH and did not relieve the wandering one bit. It was pretty dissapointing. Which leads me to beleive there is something else at play here on my car.

[SBT]

BT4 - I had just the opposite experience, when I put the AVO LCA bushing set on, everything tightened up. Adding >6* positive camber eliminated the baudot issue, and the grooved highway tramlining on the SoCal freeways, and really buttoned the car up, handling-wise. Probably the best bang for the buck ime - at the expense of NVH, which I can live with over most surfaces. Of course, this was all with a performance alignment, Bilstein struts/Swift Wagon springs, AVO 20mm RSB, urethane bushings and end links all around with rear adjustable LCAs. All documented here

[SBT]

by the way, the AVO bushings caused more NVH and did not relieve the wandering one bit. It was pretty dissapointing. Which leads me to beleive there is something else at play here on my car.

 

Why don't we get together and check it out. LMK via PM if you're interested.

[BT4]

Logic tells me that it is a mechanical issue that can be solved. There is slop somewhere, because the car moves back and forth on the freeway without any input to the steering. I actually rest my elbow on the armrest and lock the wheel with my left hand so it cannot move even a fraction of an inch. Then sit back and enjoy the show or not! The only thing that saves me is to relax and try and ignore it. It is only on these longer trips that it get's to me. It is a very slight movement back and forth where you can feel it in your body. The car does not depart from a straight line enough to be alarming or anything. Around town on short errands the car handles well and is very tossable.

If you had this issue and solved it with your mods, I would be very interested in driving your car to restore my faith. Right now I am a little leary of spending any more time and money on the car without knowing for sure what the result is going to be...I will pm you to see if we can pull off a test drive.

[Pawlwawl06]

Mine was definitely a tire pressure issue...fixed today.

[OhBe1]

Good point. The dealer put more in the back than front - massive understeer + instability was truly weird.

Fixing pressures (even only 1-2 psi more in the front makes a difference), plus maxing front camber helps immensely.

[Pawlwawl06]

Plus i was reading in the manual the other day that checking the tire pressure when the tires are hot(after riding around on them for awhile) is not a good idea because the reading will not be accurate at all. Maybe that explains why mine was so screwed up.

[SBT]

Yeah - your TP readings "hot" are going to read 2-4* higher than they would at "cold" state. So, if you lower your hot pressures to stock pressures, allow the tires to cool, you'll be running at 2-4 psi less than you should be.

 

Cold pressures will also increase (without driving) if the sun has direct access to the sidewalls which will produce an uneven pressure, side-to-side, that really makes driving squirrelly.

 

That's why I check my TPes on all five early each Saturday morning, before driving on them and before the sun hits them. That way, even if the sun heats them and then I drive on them, the other side will equalize to road temps. But if you reduce the sun-heated side to equal the other side, you'll never equalize. The reduced pressure heated side will always have less pressure than the opposite side

 

My rule of thumb is if a driven "hot" tire is low on air (IOW - it would be less than my normal settings if allowed to cool), I always air up all four tires to whatever my cold settings are, plus 3 psi, keeping the 2 psi bias F-to-R.