What have you done to your Tacoma today? 1st Gen Edition

I was kinda wondering that too, I have 4.3° of caster and feel it's difficult enough.

 

Jesus, how do you get that much? I’m at like 2.4

 

It's definitely a compromise. IMO, 3.5-4° is the sweet spot between more stability without too much turning effort. You are getting yours from maxing out the cam adjuster on the stock lowers and SPC uppers only correct?

 

What UCAs are you running?

 

SPC uppers and having tubbed enough out of my wheel wells haha. I could only get like 2° out of my stock arms. I'm also not lifted very much, only like 2" over stock, the rest of the height is tire so my bottom adjusters aren't even maxed out.

 

Im over 4 or near 5. Honeslty didn't seem that big of a change for the 0 it was before. Not big enough to worry about it.

 

Well I've only driven it 13 miles but they were mostly freeway. Its actually a little darty right now, but I need to check my tire pressure and i think it was like that a bit before too. So it could just be my tires catching the groves in the road. My turning is a little stiff right now but I have new spherical upper and lower ball jts so they need to break in a bit but it's not to bad.

All the fancy stuff helps.

I was at 2* before the solo lowers too. I'll see of I can fins a old aliment paper

 

Icon tubular

 

Same setup as you other than different shocks. Few things I've noticed...

-With that much castor, you're gonna find that the truck will want to stay in the grooves in the road.
-You might also observe more understeer than before.
-When your wheels are turned, you'll have a lot of negative camber. So therefore a smaller contact patch with the ground when your wheels are turned. This is a good thing when turning at speed and loading down one side of the vehicle, but not so much when offroading and the suspension isn't loaded on that side.

 

I might be wrong about this, but I would think that UCA would add 2° of positive caster by default over the OEM arms. This would mean that even with 2.5-3" of suspension lift you should still be able to get 3° of caster overall with OEM LCAs.

 

I had the same experience when I was on stock arms and my TC UCA (which should be identical in the castor-adding department to the Icon).
Was only able to get like 2.5 max with the cams crossed up.

 

So how dose that change the handling off road? What should I be looking out for?
Did lower unballs "break in" and have the return to center get better.
I was thinking on my drive home this morning that it was wandering is because I was over correcting the center which is really stiff right now. But as you stated it was following the groves , but everything got better the faster I drove.
What #'s have you found gave you the best middle ground?
Thanks for your input.

 

The more positive caster the less strong the return to center should be. Uniballs don't break in, they wear out, your truck shouldn't have any issue fighting their natural resistance to return to center. (EDIT: I guess they do break in a certain amount but it should happen rather quick) Pretty sure that behavior is all just from a lot of caster. Caster is mostly a "feel" thing other than the adjustment it makes to roll center (causing more or less camber in a high degree turn) it doesn't affect tire wear or handling capability dramatically. Play around with it until you like it, but I would shoot for like 3.5 next time on mine, you might not be able to take so much out with a lower arm that pushes the spindle bottom forward an extra inch but i think you can still turn it down a bit easy enough.

 

Yanked the scangauge II out of the truck last night. With the mention of potential for parasitic draw from the interface cable, I'm going to keep it out for now and monitor since I was having that drop with my NorthStar AGM.

 

What @Speedytech7 said.

Compared to stock alignment, you do have to get used to how it drives a little different with all of the added castor. Different "feel" like Zane said.
Right now I'm a bit over 4 degrees iirc, but next alignment I plan to try and get it closer to 4 or below. We'll see if that's feasible or not.

Another thing with these arms, is do not cross up the alignment cams (i.e. forward cam turned all the in, and rearward cam turned all the way out). With the bushings being as stiff as they are, they don't deform well and will get torn up and distorted over a period of time if you drive it like that. Keep the cams as straight as possible in relation to each other.

Ask me how I know....


What kind of grease did you use on the bushings?

 

Uniballs definitely break in.

I've seen them loosen up the through-bolt when turning when they're new. Would be even worse when you have brand new ones top and bottom.

 

Huh TIL I guess, usually if mine have ease of motion it is moments before they clunk and must be replaced

 

In my experience it doesn't take very long for them to break in though. Like 50 miles or so. They're stiff as hell when new though. Needed a cheater bar to pivot the ball in my UCA by hand after replacing it.

 

The only ones I haven't needed a cheater on were already squeaking and ready for replacement, but I guess I never paid attention to the difference in force I put on the cheater.

 

Another factor to consider with uniballs is their tightness spec. Not all uniballs are created equal with regards to that. FK brand offers F and F1 on their 1" balls. The F1 spec is definitely tighter and will require some sort of leverage advantage to move by hand when new. In theory the F1s should last longer too by retaining that tightness longer. On my Camburg arms I've used both. FWIW, I got about 20K more out of the tighter spec.