will 88 camry front springs fit?

[Petros]

it is the diameter that is critical, it has to fit in the seat. most of the camry springs are soft spring rate, but longer. you can stiffen it up by cutting the length, but I would not use camry springs to raise the ride, it will greatly increase over steer. the car already has slight understeer, but this I suspect would take it too far, particularly if you put stiffer springs in the rear. The car will want to swap ends on ice or loose gravel roads.

[ARCHINSTL]

If it helps, Toy's word for the "hats" is "seats," and the rubber piece in between the spring and the seat is called a "coil insulator" - in Toy-speak, anyway.
What most AM vendors call "strut mounts (or "front mounts" in the case of our 4WD's)," Toy calls "supports."
Tom M.

[ARCHINSTL]

Sorry - I cannot help there.
When I did totally evverthang new in Goldie's front end, I used all Toy OE parts, save for the KYB strut inserts, bumpers, strut mounts, and AZ's Duralast-branded springs. This was back in 2007.
Tom M.

[Petros]

there are a lot of members doing different things to their tercel suspension, so you get a lot of different options on what can be done. In one of the threads I have given spring rates, free length and a lot of other information on what affect each would have on the suspension. I will try and summarize it here below, but perhaps once we have a good selection of tested upgrades we can make a new repair guilds thread that lists options, benefits, and negative implications of each set up.

The first thing you must do before you do any mods is to make sure all of the ball joints, rod ends,streering rack, bushings, etc are in good condition. There is no point in replacing hard parts when you have worn out steering rack, it will still handle badly. After that, the most important improvement you can make is go to alloy 14" dia wheels and a 60 seiris lower profile tire, the stock steel wheels and the tall tires are soft and fleximble, this will make a noticable improvement. You can also go to largaer dia wheels and lower profile tires, this will improve dry road handling, but make wet weather performace worse, and also snow and gravel performance worse. The lower profile tires are also much more costly and far more prone to rock damage if you regulalry drive on rough roads (like I do).

to just raise the car you can add spacers under the top of the struts and the rear springs, it will keep the same medium soft ride and give you a little more ground clearance. your center of gravity will also be raised so your on-road performance will suffer. If you raist the front by more than about an inch or 1.5 inches at most, the angle on the cv axle will cause it to wear out fast. one forum member raisted his front and rear 3", and wore out his front cv joints, and damaged the seals to the strut incerts, in only about 6000 miles. To reduced this angle and raise the car would require a lowering the engine and transmission, which means your ground clearance gain under the engine goes away (though it woulld still help the center clearance). raising the rear also puts a larger angle on the u-joints, but it does not appear to be enough to create issues it the u-joint.

the more stiff the spring rate the faster you can take hard bumps, but this will make the ride more uncomfortable at lower speeds (like most things there are trade offs). It is possible to put longer and softer springs that would actually improve ride, and still get more tire and ground clearance by raising it an inch or two. but the balance between the front and rear stiffness will affect handling.

The balance is important for safe control of the car when you are at the limits of traction, you can have understeer (car makes a larger circle than where you steer the front wheels), you can get over steer (where the car steers into a smaller circle than where you point the front wheels, considered unsafe since it causes the rear wheels to come around the turn faster than the front and easy to cause a spin out). Or neutral steer, considered ideal by most because the cars stays in control. the tires size, traction and pressures front and rear, the weight distribution front to rear, the stiffness of the anti-sway bars, front and rear, and the stiffness of the springs, front and rear, all affect oversteer/understeer. We usally all will use the same size wheels and tires, and will want to set up for a typical weight distributions (though must be aware that if you load up the rear it will greatly affect handling). on a pick up truck or a wagon like we have, one might consider intentionally setting up light understeer without a heavy load in the rear, and than expect it to go to light over steer when you have extra weight in the back like on a road trip to go skiing (where you know you will be on snowy roads, so be aware you can eaily swap ends when on snowy roads). Or you might want to keep the heavy understeer so when you have a heavy load in the back it will still be manageable on slippery roads.

the stiffer the front springs and sway bar, the more weight transfer in a turn. The more weight transfer the more side slip, which is what causes under-steer or over steer depending on if it occurs more on the front or the back. This means that if you for example stiffen the front, and not stiffen the rear, you will get more understeer. that is, in a turn, the front wheels tend to plow while the car more or less wants to stay going straight. If you stiffen the rear, with out changing the front, you will get more over steer, where the steering input will be exaggerated and the rear end will want to come around the turn faster than your steering input.

Usually what you want to achieve is a neutral steer, or even slight overseer, for performance driving. that is true for both off road, and on road performance. the car stock has mild under-steer, which is considered safer for typical unskilled drivers. and usually you choose the stiffness of springs you want for your expected driving conditions, and than adjust the size of anti-sway bar to bring the car back to neutral steer. our problem is we do not have a lot of options for sway bars, I think there is a lighter weight rear one off other models that can be used, but mostly we are stuck with either removing the rear bar all together, or choosing springs that keep the car balanced.

And with our cars all we can do is trial and error until it feels right when you take around corners at the limit of traction. It would be nice to try a lot of different combinations of springs, right height and with/without rear sway bar installed, and actually measure lateral acceleration on a skid pad, and make note of the understeer/oversteer of each combination, and than do it all over again with 300 lbs in the cargo compartment. That would be the best way to come up with the best combination of springs.

for now my personal feeling is that going to slightly stiffer springs front and rear, and limit the raising of the car to 1.5" inches, in addition to 14" alloy wheels, is the best and safest combination to try out. These all assume proper damping by the shocks, do not go too stiff, over damping can be as bad as under damping, and makes it ride harsh too.

[Petros]

the MR2 "triangle" style alloys fit good, it is "factory Toyota" and looks great on a Tercel4wd, has proper off set too. They are 5.5x14" and a very tough wheel, it will take off road abuse. they are usually cheap to get from the MR2 forum since they all want to up grade to costly fancy 17" wheels.

Honda CRX/Civic wheels fit except the center hub is larger bore. I am running aftermarket 6x14 alloys meant for a honda on my TErcel, it is a bit of a nuisance to mount the wheel on the hub, but no other problems.