camber settings, What are you guys running? Options

[914dave]

Won't be long til we're off to alignment and corner balance. The car is mostly street use and probably a monthly autocross. 21mm bars up front and 180# adjustable coilovers in the rear. 23mm front sway bar and the front spindles are raised 19mm. Torque bias limited slip and a stock rear sway bar.
Are you guys running stock settings? I don't mind a little more aggressive but it's not an all out competition car. I'll sacrifice a little more tire wear for performance. What have you guys run that works?

[Mark Henry]

What do you guys think about doing your own alignments?
There's real cheap tools for setting camber or you could set up something that uses a tilt box.
Toe in is easy to make a fixture to do that.

I'm asking because I have 4 cars that will need alignment soon and I do at least 1-3 cars a year. The shops are all 60+ minute round trips, up to a couple hours there minimum, so by time I get back a better part of the day is shot.

[LowBridge]

What do you guys think about doing your own alignments?
there's real cheap tools for setting camber or you could set up something that uses a tilt box.
Toe in is easy to make a fixture to do that.

I'm asking because I have 4 cars that will need alignment soon and I do at least 1-3 cars a year. The shops are all 60+ minute round trips, up to a couple hours there minimum, so by time I get home a better part of the day is shot.

with even simply tools this is very easy to do... however and this is the big however, you must have a flat working surface otherwise it's not going to work and this is why I had Chris do mine..

[Mark Henry]

with even simply tools this is very easy to do... however and this is the big however, you must have a flat working surface otherwise it's not going to work and this is why I had Chris do mine..

Yep, I was thinking about that because my floor isn't perfect. My idea on that is bolt plates to the floor in the four corners that are perfectly level. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/idea.gif)

[Dave_Darling]

Yep, I was thinking about that because my floor isn't perfect. My idea on that is bolt plates to the floor in the four corners that are perfectly level. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/idea.gif)

Linoleum tiles. (Or other thin-ish floor tiles.) Use a nice tube level (tube with colored water in it) to figure out how much height has to be added to the floor in each spot. You can even paint the number of tiles on the spot on the floor so you don't have to measure every time. The tiles are tough and stack to give you a decent amount of leveling.

Put driver-equivalent weight in the driver's seat. Especially if you're a big guy like many of us.

Strings are a little bit of a pain to set up--mostly getting the reference to the actual centerline correct--but are dead-nuts simple once they are set. If you're going to be aligning one car a whole lot, it can be worth it to build fixtures that attach to the car itself that hold the strings. Still useful, but less guaranteed to be precise, on other cars of that model.

Measuring camber is easy. Caster is the tough one, and usually you'd just measure camber change as the steering wheel is turned a specific amount.

--DD