KO2 Wear

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arich

arich

Anthony. aka arich
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127
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Location
New York
My buddy and I are seeing very similar wear patterns on our 200s. Similar set ups. He has Radflos, I have BP51, both have SPC UCAs and we both went to same family owned alignment shop, not a box store.

Alignment took and hour with multiple test drives. Anyway we're both see wear on the front outside edge after getting together this weekend. I'm approaching 5,000 miles and I'll rotate soon. The pics below are after just 2500 miles on his truck. His wear is worse than mine. 95% on road city/highway driving. What say the MUD?

Thinking we may want to dial more caster in than the suggested +2.

Anthony

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arich said:
My buddy and I are seeing very similar wear patterns on our 200s. Similar set ups. He has Radflos, I have BP51, both have SPC UCAs and we both went to same family owned alignment shop, not a box store.

Alignment took and hour with multiple test drives. Anyway we're both see wear on the front outside edge after getting together this weekend. I'm approaching 5,000 miles and I'll rotate soon. The pics below are after just 2500 miles on his truck. His wear is worse than mine. 95% on road city/highway driving. What say the MUD?

Thinking we may want to dial more caster in than the suggested +2.

Anthony

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Wow. That looks very weird.
I just drove over 4000 miles on mine last month...adding to another 8000+ already on them, and I've seen nothing like that. Almost wonder if you got a bad batch of rubber or something. Weird.
 
Markuson,
What pressure are you running? I'm at 42 cold. I'll post some pics of mine later. Definitely not as bad but worse than my neighbor's stock Tundra with KO2s.
Ant
 
Looks like camber is not at 0. I've got 7,000 miles of my KO2s on an FJ with a Total Chaos long travel. I do my own alignments, and mine look basically new.

That shop needs to dial it in a hair, not saying saying they're bad guys, probably real honest people, but just might need to adjust their technique for you and your buddy's LC.
 
Taco2Cruiser said:
Looks like camber is not at 0. I've got 7,000 miles of my KO2s on an FJ with a Total Chaos long travel. I do my own alignments, and mine look basically new.

That shop needs to dial it in a hair, not saying saying they're bad guys, probably real honest people, but just might need to adjust their technique for you and your buddy's LC.
Click to expand...

I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure what to ask for. Dial in more negative camber, positive caster? I understand the basics but not enough to do it myself.
My wife's GL350 has much more caster and at full turn you can see hers has negative camber on the outside wheel while mine has positive camber.
We both have the UCAs set at the recommended +2 to give 0 degrees. I get that perhaps the alignment shop needs to dial it in a little better.
Thanks, for the help.
 
arich said:
Markuson,
What pressure are you running? I'm at 42 cold. I'll post some pics of mine later. Definitely not as bad but worse than my neighbor's stock Tundra with KO2s.
Ant
Click to expand...

I've been running significantly lower than that....and during that long trip, I was actually running VERY low for highway use. I was clear down at 32 cold...37 warm. Probably not the best idea. I'm now running higher, but still pretty low at 37 cold, which shoots up to 41 warm. So far, wear and handling have been excellent.
 
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Oh sorry, so in extreme basics:
caster is a forward or backward slop the tire is in relation to a line drawn from the upper and lower pivot points in your control arms
Camber is how far the tire angles on its inside or outside sidewalks
Toe is how close the two tires angle in at the lead edge of the tires

So camber should be 0 or flat as in the tires are sitting as strait up and down as they could while on the ground and loaded with the vehicle weight.
I toe the tires in a 1/32" to make the front tires fight each other while doing down the highway. Think your hands in a rushing river, make your hands flat, palms facing each other and push against the current finger tips forward. If you angle your hands finger tips a little closer and palms a little farther away, your hand are more stable than if you angled you hands finger tips wider and palms closer. You don't want to let the water get between and start force you to make adjustments, same with road irregularities, let the tires slightly push against each other, ultimately working the two front tires together to push generally in a strait line, vs a tire that could hit road irregularity and want to pull to the outside, leaving the other tire to get drug until momentum stabilizes.
Caster is generally better to push to the positive, but if I get camber at 0 with a perfect toe in and the steering wheel perfect, a little negative caster using worth listing those other good attributes.

Ok maybe that wasn't basic, and hopefully I didn't make things worse.
 
My tires. 5,000 miles.

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Starting to wonder if maybe lower pressure is better...? Here are mine with roughly 14,000 miles including a ton of daily driving and recent 4000 trip at lower pressure than most of you run...
Admittedly very little sidewall abuse during that period

These look pretty dang good to me:

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I have 6k on my KO2s, just did a 5 tire rotation and didn't notice anything odd. Here's the tread depth on the four, including the one which is essentially brand new (used to be the spare before rotation). I measured the inner tread, center tread, and outer tread for all four tires:

DF: 14/32, 15/32, 14/32 (this is the new / former spare)
DR: 13/32, 13/32 , 13/32
PF: 12/32, 13/32, 13/32
PR: 14/32, 13/32, 13/32

I can attribute a lot of variance to user error as well as the spring-loaded depth measuring tool I am using. All in all, pretty even wear.

After my lift with UCA done by Slee, the toe/camber/caster were pretty much 0 across the board.

Edit: I run 39 psi across all 4.

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Roads in NY are very rough unlike CA and the south where everything concrete.
 
I am running 41-42 psi... I may drop mine down a couple of psi, just in case and to soften the ride a little.
 
Here are my rears.
Obviously my front outer edges are taking more of a beating. I don't drive it like it's stolen. NY roads above NYC and my commute, The Bronx River Parkway, are very twisty, Lots of stop and go traffic, which might explain the wear in and on the blocks.
Sinister lives out on Long Island. Wonder how his KO2s are holding up on conditions similar to mine but with a stock alignment.

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Don't have a pic handy right now but I've got over 11k on mine and wear looks perfectly even. I am running 38-40 psi.
 
Arich, when I first got my front end alignment on my 37s, I drove it around a few days, but noticed things didn't look exactly right, the camber was visually off. I took it back to the shop, and it showed perfect camber on the machine. That being said, I had them bring the camber in a bit until it "looked" right to me.

I guess my point, is that the larger tires, though the machine says they are aligned in spec, may still need some tweaking. The guy at the shop explained it to me, but I forgot exactly what he said.
 
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