Corner Balance

What is corner balancing?

Corner balancing is the process of shifting the weight carried by each wheel to approach optimal values by adjusting the suspensions spring height.

The goal is to get the diagonal weights even also known as cross weight. This is achieved by having the left front and right rear corners to carry 50% of the vehicles total weight while having the right front and left rear corners to carry the other 50% of the vehicles total weight.

What are the benefits of corner balancing?

  • Achieve great handling for your vehicle.
  • Helps with weight distribution of the vehicle when turning. Reducing the teeter totter effect.
  • Handles evenly in left and right turns resulting in a very stable and predictable handling vehicle.

Why corner balancing?

Corner balanced car will handle evenly in left and right turns. Unbalanced handling will occurs when the left front and the right rear weight are not equal to the right front and left rear weight. 

If the car is extremely imbalanced by not having an equal cross weight this can cause a teeter-totter affect, which can have a wheel off the ground. 

Street cars are rarely corner balanced as they don't have coil over kits where you can adjust the height. This is because their spring rate is relatively low, about 100lbs/in. With such low spring rates it would take a huge imbalance in spring height to an affect on corner balancing.

Race and performance cars may have spring rates of 300, 400, 500 lbs/in or higher. Corner Balacning than becomes more important due to the high spring rates. Small changes in height can greatly impact the weight carried of the vehicle.