[rwalker]

Today I removed the Ground Control (GC) camber plates I've been running for about 16 months.

I was an early adopter of GC plates for the F-series, and as many know these plates weren't ready for prime time when they launched:

• the spring perch rubbed on the slider center, causing metal-to-metal contact
• after machining for more clearance, the spring perch still interfered with the slider
• the urethane bushing in the first designs over-stressed the strut shank stud, leading to failure of the strut
• the initial run of spherical bearings weren't clearanced correctly, causing a shit ton of noise

GC was very supportive though, and over the course of a year with a fair bit of back and forth they got the product to a "basically working" state.

I never had the issues that others had with bearing retainer failure. It's my sincere belief that these issues resulted from improper installation.

While the plates performed perfectly on the track and at speed/high load conditions, the plates continued to clunk at low speeds over bumpy surfaces. This nagging irritation made them unsuitable for my daily driver, which is why I've been trying other plates (TC Kline, K-MAC) and pestering Vorshlag and Dinan for their solution.

In search of a cause of the noise, I took these pictures and vids.

Notice how much dirt has been trapped in the spring perch. When I disassembled these plates there was dirt trapped between the bearing and the perch, preventing them from fitting together square. Disregard the grind marks inside the perch, those are from early days and the interference issues mentioned above.



A lot of dirt has been pushed into these OEM bearings in 6k miles. Note that no damage has occurred to the plastic retaining edges of the bearing, which have been supported by the perch wall and the slider.



The bottom of the bearing shows where dirt has been living between it and the perch.



The bearing doesn't move smoothly anymore, it's super gritty. We get very little rain here in San Diego, so this is what 6k miles of sunny freeway looks like.

When the perch is unevenly loaded, the bearing partially separates and makes a clunking noise. I think this is the smoking gun for my noise. I run a lot of camber, and the non-articulating perch means the bearing is unevenly loaded, leading to this... That clunk is almost exactly what I hear in my parking garage at work.

I realize that many others on this forum run GC plates without any issue. My guess is that they must be running less camber than I. I don't think this bearing/perch configuration is suitable for our non-articulating perches/buckling springs. The stock spring perch is a lot more forgiving.

[rwalker]

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[Pparana]

Those held up much better than mine, could prob just toss in some new bearings. I can't for the life of me understand why gc does not extend the bearing perch the whole length of the bearing.

Of course with all the new options for plates on the market it's hard to justify a sub par design.