Hotchkis #1107 Header Clearance Problem

[Wild Tejas]

Hello everyone,
This is my first post on the forums and I want to see if anyone can help me with some upper control arm clearance problems. I have a 69 Camaro with a ZZ502 and Doug’s 320 headers. Last weekend I installed a set of upper and lower Hotchkis control arms and BB lowering springs. Well I should say I started. Everything went in pretty smoothly until I tried to install the passenger side upper control arm. It instantly hit the number four header tube. At first I thought it was a header problem but I had a set of Hooker headers laying around and swapped the Doug’s out but still had the same problem. I dented the Hooker header just to see how much room I would need and pretty much had to crush it in half to get the upper arm to fit. I put the old control arm back in with the Doug’s header and it fits perfectly with over ¾ inch clearance. Comparing the Hotchkis upper control arm to the factory arm the part#1107 is 2.5 inches wider and is 1.5 inches longer from the rear mounting hole.

Has anyone run into this and how did you fix it? I called Hotchkis and they were zero help. Guy keep putting me on hold to ask someone else for the answers. Anyway I got a lot invested in the whole Hotchkis front end kit and don’t want to crush my new headers for a control arm that looks like it was designed to large. If this part won’t fit can someone recommend a upper control arm that will fit more like factory? It also bothers me to be mixing and matching upper and lower control arms from different companies.

I will post pictures later when I have time to get into the garage. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Nick