Tall ball joints, .9" vs .5"?

[juggernaut]

Hi,

I'm looking to install some tall upper ball joints on my first gen Camaro. I currently have a stock suspension. After reading various threads and Pozzi racing, seems like a no-brainer. I'm not finding much info on the .9" ball joints. So, if .5" is good is .9" better?

[UMI Tech]

We don't specialize in 1st Gen but I can give you some general tendencies:

0.5" tends to work fine in stock arms. Enough of a change to add some camber change during travel but not so much to wreck clearances and so on.
0.9" may work with stock arms but I'll leave that answer to the 1st Gen experts.
You probably won't have TOO much camber gain with 0.9's.
We've found that 0.5's are a nice inexpensive way to get some improvement.

ramey

[Rod]

.5 vs .9....theres no steadfast rule, it is what ever is needed is why there's 2 sizes...so depends on rims, arms, brakes, offset and purpose, if your doing stock arms, I would only do the .5 the .9 might stress the stock arm ball-joint area I would also do a guldstrand or pozzi mod to the upper arm mounting area, the .9 is kinda scary looking (that tall and skinny)...using a tall ball joint helps fix SOME camber issues, the guldstrand fixes SOME more, you really need about 3.75 taller spindle that's how bad 1st gen camaro suspension is...but then you couldn't get any rims on there, even the anti-dive angles on a camaro are off by about an inch, I think that was to make up for the lack of caster, again WAY OFF... you could use a tall spindle about 2.0 taller, add the guldstrand, decrease the anti-dive and bump the castor to about 8 and it would be close to decent, ask me how I know?...and then we need to talk bumpsteer, the guldstrand helps with that SOME....but we could go forever on that

[juggernaut]

Thank you for the replies!

[another69]

You may need aftermarket upper arms (like SPC) with tall spindles / ball joints. The stock arms may put too much of an angle on the ball joints

[David Pozzi]

Yes, running the .9" tall upper ball joints can be very close to binding with stock arms. They will work with most aftermarket arms, especially the Ride Tech or Speed Tech flat versions.
The problem I noticed is the .9" help increase camber gain over the .5" versions but also increase bump steer. There are tie rod ends that are tall but they don't do enough to help the .9" tall uppers. The .5" tall with tall tie rod ends are the best combo. Increasing positive caster does wonders for more neg camber in turns, which is where you really need it anyway. Aftermarket A arms are needed for that.
Proforged sells the tie rod ends. Higher amounts of positive caster helps reduce bump steer by tilting the steering arm down.