May I ask a favour? Sorry to dredge up info that may already be on here (I cannot find it) but my engineer asked that I provide the measurement of the stanza steering arm to determine whether or not there is any bump steer since changing from 120y struts. I don't have any spare ones to measure anymore.

The measurement in particular is the height from the mounting face to the centre of the tie rod hole (assuming the vernier was on an imaginary surface so it didn't actually go in the whole and give a wrong measurement, on the 120y arm I measured that distance to be 17.7mm. Could anyone help?

I need a pic but can measure on my stanza if I can see what u need

I'll use this pic as an example thanks to DD, see how the tie rod mount and the strut mount are at different levels? I need that height measurement.

mind you I got my steering arms out of an Aussie Stanza with girlocks but that shouldn't make a difference.

1200 15.30 22-0 r1
Stanza/sunny 12.40 15-0 w50 r1

Hi guys is bump steer a common thing when changing the front end and how is it prevented?what stops bump steer?

Nick what are those other numbers? I gather the height is 12.4mm which indicates there will perhaps be some bumpsteer (as if I didn't already know, but for engineering purposes I just let them do the talking)

bump steer is basically the term for the following condition

If you have the car off the ground, and the spring out *(just to make it easy to actually test for it, obviously don't drive it like that!) you then have the wheels pointing straight ahead and you then move a wheel up and down through its full suspension travel. If the wheel keeps pointing straight ahead that's zero bump steer. If the wheel starts to turn, as you compress the suspension then you have bump steer. All cars will tend to have some small amount.

It's called bump steer because when it is significant enough of a change of wheel angle, then when you go over bumps, the wheel turns and it can make the car want to pull one direction or the other.

In very very general terms, the way to avoid it is to have the drag link inner tie-rod end bolt centres the same distance apart as the 2 bolts for the lower control arms. and then you have steering knuckles in a position so that the tie-rods themselves are the same length as the control arms (measuring from inner bolt to ball joint on the control arm) and also so that the steering knuckle tie rod height is selected so that the _angle_ of the control arm is the same (for any suspension position) as the tie rods.

There's a little bit more to it than that, but that's basically it.

From this it might be obvious that if you made the control arms longer, you could make the tie rods longer (or just unscrew the tie rod ends to the new length if there is enough thread to do it safely) and if you had nearly zero bump steer before, you will have close to zero afterward. However, if you move the control arm bolt position outward, you will then invite more bump steer, because you can't (easily) lengthen the drag link, so you have to lengthen the tie rods. Now they will be longer than the control arm, and on a different angle to the control arm (even if it is only a slight difference).

On some cars you can find that through the normal range of suspension travel there is very little bump steer, but when you lower them significantly it starts to get worse and worse.

I've got a few pics that illustrate this, I'll try and dig them up and post them into the thread on the weekend when I have a little more time.

Yes sorry the numbers are the steering arm numbers as there are a few types I believe

Sounds like what crumb was experiencing in his sedan