My front driver side tire hits the top of the wheel well whenever I go over a bump at moderate speed. It's enough to make the car pull to the left and make a burned plastic smell from the plastic liner.

It started when I replaced my very old Bilstein stuts with Monroe struts.

I have 2" drop spindles on the front with the stock springs. I used to have Bilstein stuts/shocks all the way around and never had a problem. Recently I replaced all the steering linkages, ball joints, and struts because I was getting wheel bounce when braking hard. I put the Bilstein struts on 13 years ago and figured they would probably be worn out, big mistake.

This is my daily driver nowadays and I wasn't looking to install any high-performance parts so I bought some basic Monroe struts. After replacing all the parts, the driver side wheel rubs as described above. It's particularly bad when I'm turning right on a windy road (car leaning left). Only the driver side seems to rub.

Unfortunately, I destroyed the struts when taking them off. The strut mount bearing nut was seized and I had to grind the nut off along with most of the threads on the strut. Sadly, the old struts seems to be just fine...

Anyway, I've done some searching and it seems this isn't a very common problem (Mostly tires seem to rub when turning or because a bad alignment). Is this as simple as needing to buy new Bilstein struts? Could something else be causing the problem? Are the other (cheaper) struts that would perform better than these Monroes?

 

Sounds like that wheel has positive camber instead of negative.

Get it aligned. Have it set it to about -1° camber, with slightly more on the right than the left (maybe ½° split), and about +4 - +5° caster, again with about a ½° split to the right.

 

It had been aligned before I posted. The rubbing was the same before and after. The measurements are:

Driver Passenger
Camber +0.2 +0.0
Caster +4.4 +4.2
Toe +0.01 +0.01

You think having -1.0 on the driver side and -0.5 on the passenger would solve the problem?

 

Who made the drop spindles? What are your spring rates? Stock strut towers? Pics of rubbing spots?