teener alginment, would you trust a porsche dealer ? Options

[sk8kat1]

I am still tring to find an alginment closer to home .. but may have to drive better than an hour to the place I found ...

There is a porsche dealer here in rockford .. do you think that they would doa good job or should I stay away ?

[lapuwali]

On the rear, the centering argument has merit. On the front, it doesn't, unless the car has a lot of Ackermann built into it, and you have the steering quite well off center. Get the steering wheel reasonably centered, and you're fine. If you want to be anal about it, measure it three times, once with the steering centered (as well as you can), once with the wheel to the left about 1/4 turn, and again with the wheel to the right 1/4 turn. The average of these three will be the toe within any useful tolerance.

At the back, you're somewhat at the mercy of whomever set the rear toe last time. Doing it with strings is more accurate, but it's pretty hard to get the strings parallel both to each other and the centerline of the track (note: not the centerline of the car, but the center between the wheel centerlines, which is often different, esp. on a 914).

A way to do this with jackstands and strings is to line up two strings that are parallel with each rear wheel (easy to do with a ruler) which also extend behind the car a few feet. Now, line up another string that's 90d from the left hand string over to the right hand string. If the angle at the right hand string and this transverse string is also 90d, you have zero rear toe, and they're even, and you can stop (unless you want some toe-in).

If it's less than 90 degrees, you have toe-in. If it's greater than 90 degrees, you have toe-out. Now, place another string at 90d from the right hand string over to the left-hand string. Measure from where the strings cross to each side string. If it's the same on each side, the wheels are evenly adjusted. If the center is shifted to the left, the left hand tire is toe'd in more than the right hand tire. If the center is shifted to the right, the right hand tire is toe'd in more than the left hand tire.

The farther back from the car you can extend the side strings, the easier it will be to measure the difference in side-to-side differences.