crxguy52

I wanted to add more camber to my mostly stock 2004 S2000 and I couldn't find any shops to do it, so I decided to do it myself. This won't cover the actual adjusting - that's covered very well by Rob Robinette - but rather how to set up the strings on a stock AP2.

The goal is to set up two strings, both parallel and equidistant from the car's center line. This isn't very hard, but it's tedious the first time. I made a string holder setup using suction cups like this one, but I didn't know the difference between front and rear track widths measured from the center caps of the stock wheels. Enter... some conduit:







I bought two piece of conduit and made some notches in them exactly the same distance apart - I actually just clamped them together and filed a notch in both pieces on each end. I then put them on jack stands as shown above, one in front of the car and one behind it. I wanted to fix one fore and aft, so I pushed the rear snugly against the rear bumper.

The idea here is to create a parallelogram, since measuring the diagonals to make a box would be difficult at best. For those who slept through that geometry class, a parallelogram is defined as a four sided shape that has two sets of equal length sides (think a rectangle that got pushed over). By definition, the two equal length lines are parallel. Since the notches (which hold the strings) are the same distance apart, all we have to do is make sure the strings are the same length to create our parallelogram. I used a tape measure like so:



159" was a nice round number, so I moved the conduit in front of the car until both sides measured the same:





Hooray beer parallelogram! Now that we've got two parallel strings... near the car, it's time to center it. This is an iterative process, since the front affects the rear and vice versa. I started by measuring the distance from the string to the center cap on the left and right sides in the front, adding, and dividing by two. This should get you in the ballpark, so move to the rear and do the same. Repeat as many times as it takes to get the distance the same left to right. In my case it took 3 rounds, and the distance was 3.025" in the front and 1.875" in the rear. And here is what we're looking for: how much wider the rear track is at the center caps. Subtracting the two gives you 1.15" per side

I did a sanity check and measured the total toe in the front, which ended up being 0 as expected. With the difference in track width known, I put the suction cup setup on to test it out. I set the rear string to center cap distance at 1.5" and adjusted the front until I got 2.65":







Look at that, they're parallel! From here I can do an alignment without having to re-box the car every time, just by putting the suction cups on and adding 1.15" to the front center cap to string distance. This will obviously be dependent on what wheels you're running, but if you follow the conduit method you can find the track width delta for any set of wheels. Oh, I also figured out what the S stood for...



Happy aligning!