I've owned my MY99 S2K for 3 years now. I haven't had any accidents with it, however I cannot say whether it was in any accidents in the 15 years before I owned it.

I had a knocking sound from the suspension when I was turning the wheels and it turned out that the compliance bushes of the front lower arms were completely shot and I also had an issue with one of the tie rod ends. My mechanic has replaced my compliance bushes and the tie-rod ends together with the cam bolts for the lower arms. All parts are Honda original parts except for the compliance bushes which are from Mugen. In addition to this the steering wheel was a bit off centre for some time.

After replacing all the suspension parts I went to get a wheel alignment, however the technician was unable to set the correct caster for the right hand side front wheel. He tried to reduce the caster on the left hand side to get them symetrical however the lowest angle he couldn't get the left hand side matching the right hand side.

The left caster is currently at 5.6 whilst the highest value for the right caster he managed to get was 3.3. The tech told me he suspected that something is bent in the suspension. The full vehicle alignment report is attached below.

My mechanic has checked to see for any bent parts but he couldn't see any obviously bent parts, however he did say that when he was working on it he found the bolts of the subframe swapped on one side (the short bolt was instead of the longer bolt on one side) which tells me that at one point the sub frame was removed and installed back incorrectly. In addition my right wheel seems to be a bit further back in the wheel well than the one on the left hand side, maybe 1cm or so, however the alignment report is showing only 0.1 inch difference in setback.





Has anyone encountered a similar issue? Any idea which parts I need to check which might be causing this problem? Is there a way I can verify whether some part of the suspension is bent?

 

Only other thing I can think of is the tech might have been using an older machine. Where you have to do a steering sweep to measure the caster after each adjustment. Because if you replaced these things getting 6 degrees should be easy.

 

Could check the upper caster cam washer is fitted correctly as easy to get them 180 out.
You can use a finger from under car and feel

 

Thanks for your suggestions.

Do you have a picture of how it should be set properly?

 

Its got to correspond with the lower cam

 

When he first couldn't get the caster right, he told me he did the initial process again including the steering sweep as he wasn't seeing the caster changing as he was expecting. He still got the same results.

 

Take this with a grain of salt, but i had/have similar issues. The knuckles are fairly easy bent and can throw alignment specs off...i learned this through other s2ki posts. There is no method for measuring a kunckle as far as i know. People just start swapping parts until they figure it out.

one other option would be to loosen the front subframe bolts and shift the subframe over...or just put in a spoon rigid collar set so the subframe is in the correct position.

 

usually a bent part would effect more than a single adjustment, I would say its a lot more likely that the top of the caster adjuster is not lined up properly with the lower part on that side, and or the bushing portion isnt sitting properly

 

Or even caster bush 90degs out on one side