I got an alignment yesterday at sears. They were able to bring everything to spec besides rear camber. they did loosen up the lower strut bolt and tried to pull it out but were unsuccessful. the camber for the passenger side was brought down by .2 to positive .1 but the driver side wouldn't budge at positive .9. These are both pretty far from spec which is like neg .7 i believe. first of all if i install the camber adjuster bolt would this make more neg camber possible? also what adverse effects besides uneven tire wear should i suspect as far as handling......also everything in the rear is new.

thanks

You need the camber bolts to properly align the rear wheels. The camber bolts make adjusting the camber easier and more accurate than trying to do it by hand. The camber bolts go in the mounting lower hole of the knuckle.

A few other posibilites:

The lower hole may need to be 'slotted' to allow adjustment. I don't think replacement struts for the Fiero were like this but I have seen other new struts with just a round hole for the lower bolt.

I hope your mechanic realizes that he has to loosen BOTH strut bolts in order to adjust camber. I apologize if this sounds really stupid but your post only mentioned loosening the lower bolt.

Gary

[This message has been edited by gladiator (edited 09-04-2007).]

Is your car an 88? I found many Alignment shops have a hard time with the rear of the 88's; Mostly because the 88's rear suspension is so stiff. The struts have a tendancy to push the knuckle outwards with a good deal of force, sometimes causing hard positive camber that just takes a good deal of force to push the camber inward. As Avengador suggested, the cammed camber bolts are the universal solution to the problem.

the spindle could be bent, hard to do on iron tho. also i think the koni rear shocks need some help to allow them to be aligned? the only other thing is really bad strut tops but im assuming you installed new ones with the struts, if so mabye its possible to install them wrong? the strut could also be bent which isnt likely since theyre new but possible. ive seen them off by a degree on the german stuff where the strut is the upper link between body and spindle.
try lifting the car up and losening the bolts and pushing the wheel in by hand to make the most negative camber possible then throw it on the rack and see where its at. its alot easier to work your way out of the negative than it is to go into the negative. some alingment machines will also adjust for the car being lifted in the air so you can align it with no weight on it but im way to lazy for that and i dont think the lift easily fits a fiero(john beam)

I had the same problem with my alignment on the driver's side. He said there wasnt anything he could do with it to bring it out to spec and that I needed new struts to fix it.

Hes been a mechanic all his life and I got the priveledge of giving him the toughest strut bolts he's had to deal with. He had a tough time with it even with a 4ft cheater bar.

quote Originally posted by AP2k: Hes been a mechanic all his life and I got the priveledge of giving him the toughest strut bolts he's had to deal with. He had a tough time with it even with a 4ft cheater bar.

We use impact wrenches on those bolts. We have impact wrenches here that can put out 700ft lbs of torque, and 3/4" and 1" impact wrenches are available that can put out 1000 ft lbs. I find it surprising that a full time mechanic doesn't have the proper tools.

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quote Originally posted by Dennis LaGrua: We use impact wrenches on those bolts. We have impact wrenches here that can put out 700ft lbs of torque, and 3/4" and 1" impact wrenches are available that can put out 1000 ft lbs. I find it surprising that a full time mechanic doesn't have the proper tools.

If you can get the job done with a 3' 1/2 socket wrench as opposed to going to the other side of the shop for an impact wrench then so be it.

[This message has been edited by AP2k (edited 09-06-2007).]

I'm sorry to say but i have no faith in mechanics doing wheel alignments. If they can't get the car within spec by turning the bolt they say thats good enough. I took my fiero to a midas to have an alignment done on it once and it took them 6 hours and drained my battery. The only thing they had to do on the front was adjust the toe. Front camber and caster were perfect. The rest of the time was spent fiddling with the back trying to get the amount of camber i wanted, -2*. Well they got one side to -1.75 and the other to -.5 and called it a day. So i took the car back to my old highschool and threw it up on the alignment machine there. 20 minutes and i set my camber -2.75. There was enough adjustment there to go to -4. I dont know how some of these idiots get by with such poor work.

In order to get the rears at the camber I wanted, I took a carbide burr and slotted the hole further. I think I also had to grind back a stop-point in there, too. Bolted it back together, adjusted the camber, tightened it down ... no problems since 1992. No bolts were purchased either. I used Moog adjustable upper ball-joints at the front. I do my own alignments, and the only real time-consuming task is adjusting rear wheel toe using the string method referenced off the car's centerline (actually, I use fishing line instead of string).