Better than the gas station sushi.
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The Carolina Squat
- Thread starter definenredefine
- Start date
The M&H Racemaster tires from days gone by sure looked cool, but they weren't that good.... especially by today's standards. Also the suspension technology of now is far superior. Look at the small tire cars in drag racing.....
I don't get the cambered car craze. Thankfully the shop I worked in for 35+ years didn't see those things coming in. Myself I would have refused to mount a tiny tire on a wide rim and use a Cheetah Blaster to inflate it..... too much liability shoving something like that out the door.
We did get a fair amount of 24" rims and low profile tires, I let the young guys deal with that. I was the go to guy for mounting 44" Super Swampers.
It was pulled pork in a vinegar type sauce with slaw on the top. Very common now but unheard of in Texas 25 years ago.
I can still see the looks of confusion when they asked if we wanted coleslaw on our sandwiches.
Having lived in Virginia '88-94', l knew the deal.
Can someone explain this to me? I see them all the time. I don't know if there's a name for it. I call it the New York slanty wheeled idiot car.
It's called "l like spending all my money on new tires".
...and a reinforced undercarriage replacement.
Wonder how long the drive axles last with those angles.
At least with lifted trucks, we pitch the pinions up and lower the transfer case to ease angles.
As the late Frank Zappa said in a long-ago interview, "This world is just crawling with foolishness."
I would hope the name for it would be "illegal."
A slammed car on bagged suspension with rolled fenders (i.e. the cars above) is just fashion. It is no different than wearing a style of clothes. No different than jacked up pickups, carolina squat, low riders, donks, slabs and all the other variations on making cars not the same as the boring ol' toyota. Fashion.
Can they be driven safely? Absolutely. Are some poorly done? Hell yes. Do some people driving these cars do stupid things? Hell yes. Are there families in minivans bouncing down the highway with clapped out suspensions that are way less safe than these cars? Hell yes. Our highways are filled with cars much less safe than the slammed imports.
It is a badge of honor for those camber guys to wear out the tire before wearing out the new tire sticker on the tread.
This is exactly what was mentioned earlier in the discussion talking about cambered cars. Camber is that wheel angle and a part of a wheel alignment. Pretty much all new BMWs come this way to a small (yet significant) degree as do some other sporty cars. As the car leans into a corner, the tread on the outside tires is planted more flatly on the ground and will help the car corner harder. If the tires are straight up and down, the outside tires roll under in hard cornering and just plant the outside edges hard. That equals less grip.
A little bit ( 2 or 3 degrees) of that goes a long way, and typically BMWs will blow through a set of grippy tires every 10K miles. Some of that is soft tread compound and some of that is the cambering. I am including the SUVs, too. They are all a bit loco, but if you want to have fun you gotta' pay.
The clownish way these cars are cambered is strictly to be absurd and impress some folks and repel most of the rest of us. 15 years ago, it was spinner wheels. All stoopid.
Thanks for posting these pics so that folks here could see.
The amount of camber you have while the car goes into a turn is also dictated by caster.
I am a garage mechanic from way back and still keep an old 71 Dart in my garage that I bust knuckles on each weekend..... But... When my boy was a kid he raced those nitro remote control trucks. They were great fun but every race demanded a full teardown and rebuild by the team mechanic... Me.... Caster and camber on those large wheeled nitro trucks never ever made sense in my feeble brain. I can jet a carb, I can still set the tach and dwell on an old ignition.... But danged if camber and caster never made sense in my brain...
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Camber is the angle the tire stands at. Zero camber is standing straight up & down, positive camber tilts the top of the tire away from the car and negative tilts the top in.
Caster is a stability angle and not easy to actually see. It's the relationship of the upper ball joint to the lower ball joint. If you draw a line from the upper to the lower and it's perfectly straight up & down, that's zero caster. The same line with the top tilting towards the rear of the car is positive caster, and with the line tilted towards the front of the car is negative caster. Easy way to explain how caster affects handling is to think of the old 20" bike you had as a kid. The angle of the forks provided positive caster, but when you spun the handlebars around 180 degrees and the tire tucked up close to the frame, that was negative caster and the bike handled horribly.
The tires sticking way out is the latest thing in the lifted truck world. I'm seeing a lot more of this lately (been going to the Bloomsburg 4x4 Jamboree with the same truck since 1992) and I don't get it.
