Luder94

....how does one go about doing 4 wheel alignments at home?

The thought comes up seeing that I just dropped the car off at an alignment shop another member recommended me to called Tuffy's; they have Hunter's laser alignment rack.

After the home install of the N-0's, my caster, toe, and camber were really off (9 degrees of caster on left side, 7 degrees on the right; about -.7 degrees of camber on both fronts, 1.4 degress of toe-out on front right, 1.9 degrees of toe-out on front left; -2.8 degrees of camber on rear right, and -3.2 degrees on rear left; 2 degrees of toe-in on both rears)!

They quoted me $200 for an estimated 2.4 hours worth of work, and the custom adjustments that I requested.

(BTW, custom adjustments I requested are as following:

0 degrees of toe on both fronts and rear,
-.5 degrees of camber on the fronts,
5.5 degrees of caster,
and -1.0 degree of camber on the rears.

I selected these measurements to get a base feeling of the car, and then go from there)

Seeing that I want to fine tune the suspension for my tastes and want to become an overall suspension guru on our cars, I doubt that I can afford the luxury of a Tuffy's alignment everytime I will want/need one.

This leaves me with one option....do the alignment in the garage. What do I need to know on how to do the alignment, what tools do I need, will I need to use any procedural methodologies, etc.

Please help. Thank you.

BTW, if you guys know of any websites for me to reference, that'd be greatly appreciated.

meat

Maybe it's too obvious - call King Motorsports....

Luder94

Ok...forgot to mention all the parameters. Not only do I not want to spend close to $200 for every re-alignment I would like to test out, I'd also not like to travel over let's say 20 miles to go get an alignment done....

Unless of course, you meant that I call King to see if they have any pointers on how to do alignments in the garage without a Hunter alignment rack?

Testut

I'm not going to be much help but I seem to remember an article in Grassroots Motorsports about aligning cars a few months ago. I couldn't find an index of articles in the past issues on their web site, but perhaps you could e-mail them and ask or someone reading this note will remember the issue. Their web site is Grassroots Motorsports

00BLACKS2K

You could "string align" the car, which is what a lot of us racer types do. I'll post something more substantial (maybe a tutorial) in the future, but basically it involves setting up strings parallel to the centerline of the chassis and measuring from the string to wheel rim with vernier calipers to give you toe on the front and year, and the "thrust angle". We use a SmartCamber tool to measure camber and caster and simialr tools are available from Longacre, Intercomp and many others. There is a particular sequence that you should follow (caster, then camber, then toe, then a bunch of other stuff) and you'll need a way to get the car in the air to have room to get under it but still have the suspension at ride height , etc. but I'm getting ahead of myself.

A tutorial will soon follow....

Jim Mullen
Illusion Motorsports

Cyberorth

I hope this applies:

When I owned an ITR, I did a custom alignment and paid just about $200 for it as well. Custom alignment because I wanted to make sure I wouldn't get a generic integra specs.

After the alignment day, I realized that I made a mistake in the sign of rear toe (+/-). Knowing the exact values that the alignment man set on the car, I was able to correct for the proper values using the marking on the trailing arm. I think I was able to be fairly precise since I had the starting values.

After awhile I was able to verify my home adjustment and it was pretty close to what I had in mind.

Take home message: if helms says that there are demarcations on the suspension members for certain alignment values, they can be used with reasonable precision since the original values are accurately known.