Quote:
Originally Posted by bigwave2255
and of course all this becomes super critical once you go to 315 series tyres, wider the tyre the more they suffer from excessive camber, so for me its a balancing act between good cornering ability and uneven tread wear.
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Wider tires, alone, don't change the amount of negative camber.
The distribution of vehicle weight applied across the tire width (contact patch) will change with wider tires, resulting in greater inside tire wear. Wider tires will have more weight on the inside of the tire. The increased weight causes more friction resulting in increased wear. Inside tire wear will increase further if the the distance from the rim to the ground (aspect ratio) is greater. In either case, less negative camber would be necessary to decrease the friction on the inside of the tire, reducing inside tire wear.
Wider tires often mean wider rims are added at the same time. All wheels are built so that a particular amount of inches of are from the center of the wheel (offset). If the new wheels are a shorter distance on the backside of the wheel the the previous wheels negative camber will increase. The best practice when changing wheels that cause a change in offset is to have the vehicle aligned to your desired camber.
If you keep the existing wheel and go to wider tires and/or rims because they look better rather than to improve handling, you can either have the vehicle aligned at or less than specs, or, measure the tread wear across the width of the tire every 200 miles or so and depending on the inside verses outside tire wear, increase tire pressure a small number of pounds to slow inside tire wear.
My goal is handling. I am always at the maximum, within spec, negative camber. Note- I have the original style 87 rims, tire size and aspect ratio.
10-29-2013, 07:27 PM
X5 4.6 2002 Black Sap, Black interior. 2013 X5M Melbourne Red, Bamboo interior
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