Hi,

I have just changed the setup in my sprinter and have found some clearance issues when doing my roughy home wheel alignment. In a nutshell, the tie rod end ball joints touch the back side of the LCA's before I reach full lock in the rack. This inhibits the amount of lock that I now have (& partly defeats the purpose of the mod).

OLD setup was: xt130 LCA's, adm steering arms & standard 86 tie rod gear.

NEW setup is: sigma LCA's (press in ball joint), jdm power steering arms, old corona tie rod ends & tie rod outer tubes. Almost certain the tie rod gear is the same as ra40 celica but it's all my wrecker had.

Car has an adm rack & rack ends, unchanged in both setups described above.

Note that the problem I saw was with the front end up in the air and the suspension at full droop (I know you aren't supposed to do alignments this way, but it's the best I can manage at home). I run short stroke HTS dampers so there's not much droop anyhow.

With the wheel alignment toe set fairly close (but not exact) I noticed I had just under 3.4 turns of the steering wheel lock to lock. I'm fairly certain I used to have 3.5-4 turns, so I checked to make sure everything was moving freely & not interfering. Turns out that when I try & turn to full lock, the tie rod ends swing around and come into contact with the rear side of the sigma control arms.

Example: Turning full lock to the left. The LHS steering arm & tie rod end swing to the right (as they are pulled by the rack & tie rod) until the ball joint of the LHS rod end contacts the back of the LHS control arm. This happens turning both directions, not just to the left.

I suspect this problem would not occur if I used normal adm steering arms, as the standoff distance between the tie rod & control arm is longer (due to the 10mm longer steering arm). The problem can be dialled out by adjusting the tie rods longer, but obviously this adds toe-in the point of being useless.

Is anyone running this setup in their cars or seen this happen? My car is straight, never had a problem with alignments before. There is a possibility that this problem will not exist when the car is dropped on the ground and the suspension compressed, but I doubt it. I will check that tonight.

Cheers.