K-Mac Daddy

Received and installed this camber kit from K-Mac last week. K-Mac specializes in camber kits and has a slew of them to fit a wide variety of applications. The more bling ones they have are the top mount plate types commonly seen on the front of aftermarket coilover kits. Theirs however is not just the slotted plate type but rather a sandwich plate which allows camber and caster adjustment. This would have been ideal for the FX rear given the custom modified nature of my struts, but it looks like there isn’t a kit for that. Instead I had to settle for the eccentric lower mount kit. What sets their kit apart from the other typical system you see is that it does not use an undersized bolt with eccentric cam lobe as seen here to the right. Their marketing proudly proclaims no undersized crank bolts! It isn’t entirely true, if you need 15 or 17mm bolt size you get a 14 or 16mm bolt with a sleeve, but we’ll let that slide.

What you do get is a pair of assemblies pictured on the left there. A original sized bolt that has a keyed flat machined into it. A matching keyed hole is made offset in a thick washer under the head of the bolt. This creates the camming action as it rides within the ears of a plate that goes against your original strut mount. You do need to drill out the hole in your strut flange to accomodate a shouldered slotted washer. This would not have worked with my original modified strut mount as it would have made the dodgy amount of metal I had left even thinner, but with the new 3/16″ plates welded it looks fine. Included with the kit is a drill bit that enlarges your original bolt hole to the correct size. Unfortunately the bit was not made with an additional 3/4″ of steel to go through in mind. It gave up the ghost on the final hole and just made a bunch of noise and heat. I was able to coax just enough life out of the bit to get that last hole barely deep enough for the washer to seat and used a Dremel to slot it to allow the adjustment. Everything else went together well. The bolt was just long enough to handle the additional plates, whew!

I only have two issues with this kit so far. One is the locating ears of the cam plate interferes with getting a socket/wrench on the lower bolt. I plan to weld them on and cut off those tabs. The other is the bolt is grade 8.8. For an extra margin of strength I’ve been going through pains to find grade 10.9 bolts to replace the OEM bolts that are now too short. I suppose if this becomes an issue I can take a 10.9 bolt to my mystery machinist and have him machine a matching flat into it. Anyway, I’ll be taking a trip to my alignment guy once everything on the FX gets put back together and we’ll see how this works out.