Howdy,
On Tue, 23 Mar 1999, Eric Linnhoff wrote:
> I'm tired of paying someone else $50 for an alignment every time I wanna
> try soemthing different. Does anyone attempt to do their own alignments
> at home?
Yeah. Not hard. It doesn't take many alignments before you pay for the
equipment.
> The camber's easy, I just max it on both sides. But how do you measure
> your toe, in or out? I've tried the duct-tape, thumbtack and string
> method but can't find any suitable string that either isn't sag-prone or
> stretches too much to give accurate reading. Anybody got any ideas on
> fabricating a semi-rigid mesuring device that also happens to be cheap?
I do camber with a Smart Camber guage. They're something like $240. You
can also do camber with a bubble level type of guage, they're anywhere
from $100 on up. The bubble level guages are a pain and harder to use in
my estimation. I also wouldn't just max the camber, but rather measure it
to ensure that nothing is bent or whatever. And you may well want to run
less than max on the rear, which will require a guage.
For toe, the easiest thing I've found is a trammel bar. You scribe a line
on the tire by spinning it and drawing a line with a tire scriber. Then
you use the bar which has two pointers that go up to the tread surface.
You set the bar on the front of the tires, then measure the difference on
the back of the tires (for instance). Easy to do and hard to mess up.
You can buy a scriber and trammel bar from Longacre or one of their
distributers. $130 or so for both. You can also make the stuff, but $130
was cheap enough that I didn't want to mess with it. If I were making
stuff, I'd probably just make the trammel bar, and then use masking tape
on the tire as a reference. I.e., put tape on the front of the tires, set
the trammel bar to zero from that. Then roll the car back until the tape
was on the back of the tires, and measure the difference.
Oh, and all a trammel bar is is just a long piece of metal bar with two
pointers on either end that slide on the bar. One of the pointers has a
scale on the bar. You set the pointer with the scale to zero, then set
the other end so that both pointers hit the reference marks on the tires.
Then go to the back of the tire and move the pointer with the scale so
that you again line both pointers up to the reference marks on the tires.
The reading on the scale is the amount of toe you have (in or out
depending).
If you don't want to spend any money, you can also measure toe by just
stringing the car. Look on the neon sites for Eric.
Heutclalkjdfljkheasss's (sp :-) description of how to do that. I think it
was also in GRM a while back.
> Oh yeah, one more thing. Is the castor adjustable on Neons or not? How
> do you measure it and/or adjust it at home?
No, its not adjustable (beyond the standard loosen the bolts and shift
slightly method). You measure it with a camber/castor guage, but I've
never bothered to learn how because it doesn't matter because its not
adjustable... :-)
Mark
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