Recommendations for home alignment tools?

I SCCA club race. Raced NOLA this year and I like that track and the food around NOLA. To do alignments you need to invest very little. You can find a good alignment shop who can scale and align for about $500/session. You can do it yourself for a $1000 set of scales and very cheap tools. You need slip plates 12x12" steel plates with grease in between, good laser level, "L" rules, ruler, $60 toe plates off Ebay, 2 tape measures, a home depot bucket, aquarium tubing.

 

You measure camber after zeroing the laser level, and cutting your "L" rule to fit your wheel perfectly like this:
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Very quickly you 1st shim your floor to make sure it is flat using bucket and aquarium tube taped to a ruler.

air in tires to hot pressures

scale car/ corner balance

set thrust to zero

set rear camber and rear toe

set front toe camber caster

 

We used to use 4 x bathroom scales - Less than $50 each.....

Weird looks from the checkout clerk as to why we're buying four scales, but beyond that it worked well!

Beyond that, yeah, I agree - Get 'er level, then encase the thing in string and measure from that.

Cheers,
Ian

 

Don't see why it would. We used to tweak camber based on tire temps all the time - Just don't go crazy, and keep good records of what you did & the effects.....

Cheers,
Ian

 

Mainly F3, but also many "touring cars" like yours....

Sure! A quick search at Amazon turned this up for example;

Amazon.com: A&D Medical Deluxe Connected Weight Scale, Black: Health & Personal Care

Damn thing will even display to your iPhone! [Although, I guess it may get confused with 4 scales in range! ]

IIRC, and it's been a *long* time, a good ol' Goodyear (Firestone?) camber gauge - Generally just against the tire - Rotate 90deg's, remeasure, rinse & repeat for 180 & 270. We never "trusted" the wheels to be true. But 3-4 measurements off the tires would get us "close enough".

I've also cut the excess length off the gauge before now so as to go directly onto the wheel, but even then still rotated the thing to check.

Cheers,
Ian

 

I think very. For me doing all this manually it takes me a whole day to scale and align. If I skip the very beginning scaling I magnify error to the very end and waste time. But scaling is scaling and aligning is aligning. They are separate issue but you have to have a well scaled car to have a good foundation and expectation of what alignment is doing. What you don't want to do is align then alter to compensate for an error that is really corner weight. But hey I know guys who have bent a tie rod, bent it back by eye raced and won that day! Not ideal but if you got time as part of your prerace checklist enough things go wrong under the best of conditions such that I want to go into my race as 100% as I personally can get.

 

If wheels aren't true you got bigger problems. If you got more than 2oz of weigh on modern rubber your wheels are 020-40" out. Making sure wheels are true is also part of your prerace checklist. I mount and balance my own race tires too. There are a whole bunch of dumb things I do there too which could be a thread all by itself.

 

How do you guys do the corner weights when the sway bar isn't removable?

For example, on my 930 the front sway bar is permanently mounted to the a-arms...

So whenever I try to lower one side or raise it, it directly impact the other side...

I haven't corner weighted it yet, but trying to figure how that would work in this situation?


Like the prior poster said, a digital level is awesome. You can easily measure caster by taking the wheel of and just applying the level to the strut...

 

+1

All perfectly stated!

Was the tie rod guy you, by chance?

[Off topic alert]

Another of the reasons Ronnie (& maybe Fred?) were/are so cool. The former trashed his Lotus in Monaco when I was there. The guys got it back together in time for qualy, but didn't have time to align it beyond the good ol' "mark one eyeball".

Ronnie went quicker.

Cheers,
Ian

 

No reason to buy new wheels!

0-270-90-180 with the gauge on the tire.

Then, if you want to really know, swap that out for another, remeasure. Rinse & repeat for all 8 wheels.

I'm the first to admit I'm an old fart, but that thing looks "wrong" to me in *so* many ways!

We don't really care (much) about the end of the stub axle IMO. (It should be true of course).

I want to know what's happening at the contact patch.

Cheers,
Ian

 

I always used smart strings and smart camber:

Align Your Car With SmartStrings, SmartCamber | Smart Racing Products

Scott

 

Very nice!

We just "jury rigged" something around the car to do the same thing. Often times a similar concept with aluminum bars clamped to the tub.

Cheers,
Ian

 

Short answer; You can't

You must decouple the two wheels before doing corner weights will tell you anything meaningful IMO.

Cheers,
Ian

 

google it. you want 50/50 CROSSweight not side to side. You depart from 50/50 for specific reasons like weight jacking on ovals or equalizing LF and RF weights to improve straight line braking or tuning for a specifc track.

 

You are not going to change front to rear weight total or side to side totals without moving some heavy stuff, (battery, fuel tank, oil tank, or girlfriend)

FBB is right, "CROSS WEIGHT" needs to be equal, or as close as you can get. Don't forget to add sand bags to the drivers seat to simulate the drivers poundage.

For street cars or cars that go both left and right, we want the cross weights equal, (or close). Asymetry in design and driver position will make it almost impossible to get the cross weights equal. My 185 pounds in the left seat for example, or the battery being on the left with a 40 gallon windshield washer tank in the left front fender, (74 911).

My car also has the non adjustable antiroll bar to a arm attachments and non adjustable drop links at the rear, but I will find a way to shim the bar to chassis mounts to yield 0 affect.
Also, (if you don't have slip plates), don't forget to roll the car foreward and back to get the sticktion out after making adjustments.
Being a contractor, I took the woodwork approach to making a flat, level "work bench"

chris
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I'm a little late to this thread, but thought I would thrown in my $.02. I track a Miata and have a set of Flyin Miata's hub stands.

https://www.flyinmiata.com/hub-stands.html

I've used them several times and they work pretty well. Setting the alignment isn't difficult, but it is tedious. It's more of a math exercise than anything else. The problem with the Miata is in the rear, you have two eccentric bolts that both affect camber and toe. It would be next to impossible to just eyeball reducing camber without really messing up toe.

As a nice side note, you can get 5 lug mounting plates for the hub stands that will fit my 328. I haven't used them on the Ferrari yet, but that will happen in the near future.