front suspension set up

[Dave Adams]

My car will have a whole new front end on it next year, from the triumph front end (with ford adaptors) is going and will be replaced with a Ford Cortina set up ala Ron Champion's book. But i want to make the camber and the castor adjustable, the camber is easy to figure out but what methods has anyone out there used for castor adjustment?
I can think of several ways of doing it, but some seem overly complicated to achieve.
and if your wondering why i want to change a good working triumph set up, here are the geometry readings for my car, to correct them will require some radical mods to the wishbone mounts, so i might as well alter it to a full ford set up.
Measured in degrees and minutes.
1: castor N/S 1.55 degrees O/S 5.00 degrees.
2: camber N/S -2.05 degrees O/S -1.17 degrees
3: toe in N/S -1.1mm O/S -0.8mm (since altered to -0.5mm each side)

as you can see the front end is a bit of a disaster and as far as i can tell the chassis is as intended by dutton......not saying much i know.

Also my rack is triumph as well, the rack mounts are......and there is no other way of saying this.....crap, despite my recent efforts the rack actually moves side to side in the car about 2-3mm on steering left to right, a common problem with the triumph rack and its mounts apparently.

But the castor is where i have the real problem and it is not adjustable on the car as it is set up. This may be all wrong because the previous owner fitted new coil overs and made new (massively over engineered) wish bone mounts and welded them in the wrong place.

However the back axle is in almost perfect alignment, having a slight "thrust" of 0 degrees, 28 minutes to the N/S, which given my axle bushes were worn at the time of checking is as near perfect as gets........i hope. It will however, have new brackets for the 4 links to be fitted, and may well get a fifth link added to the N/S to improve axle location to help prevent the excessive axle bush wear it suffers from. (the fifth link will likely be a shocker and not a solid link arm.)

[Adrian Southgate]

My experience with MK3-MK5 cortina's is purely related to the standard car setup but they always had a wierd angle when on lock, very much like my legerra has at the moment. I'm not to hot on castor but understand camber a bit. The legerra was designed with slight negative camber to improve handling when cornering, transferring weight to the tyre on the outside of the corner which had a bigger contact patch because of the camber. The one I have now sits very level (to the naked eye) at the front and is no where near as angled as the first one I owned. I will see if I can find some pictures to illustrate.