Asking for a friend who put Aerostar springs under his 57. Tried a search to no avail. I haven’t seen the car or the setup in person as it’s 300 miles away. The springs have the car sitting good and riding good, BUT with way too much negative camber. 1. Are there offset control arm shafts available? Can find GM but no Ford. OR 2. Can he just buy longer bolts and use a solid spacer to get the camber close where it can be set with just a couple of shims. I’m going by what the alignment shop told him, and that is “The existing shaft bolts have only three threads for the nuts with the camber set.” It will take 1/2 “ spacer and longer bolts apparently. Or am I wrong? What say you 57 Ford guys who encountered this? “Paging @Jeff Norwell to the white courtesy phone, please “
57’s must be way different that 56’s. Mine needed a few shims by not much. I do my own alignments since my son has Longacre dirt track tools and plates with grease between them I had more trouble with toe than anything else.
Interesting, My ‘54 has Aerostar springs and it just has a couple of shims to get the alignment right and lots of thread showing .
From what I can and can't see, here's my advice... From what I can see, it looks like there is only a shim or 2 between the arm and the frame so I'm guessing as I'm not there to see for sure but it looks like someone may have replaced the longer arm bolts with shorter bolts. IF it does indeed only have say an 1/8" shim between them then it does have shorter bolts. As you can see in Aldeanfan photo there is 3/8" of shim there with a good 1/4" inch of bolt still sticking out and usable. So if it were in my shop I'd recommend replacing the bolts with longer bolts like factory and I prefer to use a round solid spacer over the bolts, in this case I'd probably use a round spacer of 3/8" thickness then stack the shims against the spacer. Some cars came from the factory with over 5/8" of usable/shim space in bolt length. It'd help another to know what camber readings they are obtaining by spacing out 1/2". Now if the bolts are the correct length and they are indeed maxed out then I'd go to the frame itself. Some cars that have had a hard life end up with the front cross member sagging. If this is the case then I'd fix it this way.. Put up on a frame machine, you wrap a chain around the front ear and down around the arm on both sides. The chains are then tied to the frame machine, a hydraulic jack is placed under the center of the cross member with a heavy thick plate between the jack and the xmember and slowly jacked up (i prefer a hand jack so I can feel what's happening). This pulls and spreads the cross member apart at the ears raising the camber. You will have to go a long ways, read camber and use camber as your measurements. Jack it up to 1° further than you want to go. For example if your aiming for 1° of positive camber once it's done (before alignment) you'll have to push up around 2° positive and let it set over night. Don't be surprised if you have to go more, but only move a half degree at a time after moving the initial 1°... I've done over 100 cars this way, old subframe cars were notorious for this, early chevelles etc with big blocks sagged too because they were usually driven hard back in the day... ...
Per the Ford manual for my '59, the maximum recommended shim stack is 5/8" and I'm close to that. I'm using shortened factory springs and the factory bolts/nuts.
The Jalopy Journal
