alright, it kind of scares me, when i put my car in reverse and start backing up, my tires lean in and the suspension seem to lower. then when i go forward it balances out again and then kind of leans out , moreso on the left tire then the right. someone tell me how screwed up my suspension is.

 

bushings ?????

 

Is it the front suspension, rear suspension, or both.

 

its only in the rear, the front stays level.

 

THIS IS A DANGEROUS CONDITION. YOU NEED TO REPAIR IT.

Tire lean in/out is called camber. Wheel camber is obtained by adjusting the eccentric cam and bolt assembly located at the inboard mounting of the strut rod. For the wheels to lean in/out there must be play somewhere in the strut rod assembly mechanism.

The outboard mounting location of the strut rod is the "shock mount bolt" (the lower bolt your shock absorber is attached to). The inboard mounting location of the strut rod is the long bracket attached to the bottom of your differential. The eccentric bolt is at this inboard location.

Has someone recently worked on your rear suspension, especially the strut rods? If so, there are washers that MUST go into the strut rod bushings.

If the suspension has not recently been worked on, it is likely the bushings in the strut rods have deteriorated and that is what is allowing the camber change.

Are your strut rods straight? Some "mechanics" heat and bend the strut rod in order to achieve alignment. This is not good practice, but may be an indication that they couldn't loosen the (shock mount /eccentric cam) bolts to do a proper alignment. If they couldn't loosen the bolts, then the bushings may also be deteriorated.

After the strut rods are repaired, the car will need a rear wheel alignment.

 

I had a funny problem with my 71 vert similiar to that. When backing into a parking space, the wheels would go in a little at the bottom(either 0 camber or a bit positive) and the rear body would raise up an inch or so. When pulling forward the rear wheels would go to their normal negative camber stance and body would assume normal ride height. My notion was that it was related to a toe-in or toe-out condition which would have had to do with the adjustments on the trailing arms. I later found the bushing on one trailing arm was all but gone. I put new poly bushings everywhere but sold the car before having it realigned so while not positive, I am pretty sure that was the nature of the problem.

 

TTT

 

I had the same problem a few months ago. My way of fixing it was to get the polyurethane bushings, and completely redo the rear suspension. Frankly, it really wasn't as bad as everyone said it would be. But one short cut I took was to have a local muffler shop torch out the old trailing arm bushings instead of trying to remove them myself. Knocking out the strut bushings was a breeze with the a 3.5 pound dead blow hammer from Snap-On. And in retrospect, I'm convinced that the urethane bushings are the ONLY way to go.

But regardless of what you do, when you have the car realigned, and you eventually will, make absolutely certain that who ever does it is intimately familiar with how to do the rear of these cars. This was a major deal when I had mine done, and I now realize that most alignment techs are clueless about these cars. But once it was done right, I realized that of the 3 sharks I've had, this is the only one that was aligned correctly. It really handles like a different car compared to the other two.

 

I had the same issue with the exception that I had the "lean" all the time. Had a worn rear spring. Went with new glass spring...all is well.