If the corner-weights vary, there is still some bind in the suspension. Tie Rods. Caster: The deviation in degrees between an imaginary line running through the upper and lower ball joints and a vertical line running though the center of the wheel hub to the center of the tire's contact patch on the ground. Low-cost tricks for a DIY alignment. Camber adjustment is very straightforward with the Tenhulzen gauge. Overall, I would recommend this system to anyone who has previously owned or used a toe gauge and/or camber/caster gauge. Reconnect Sway Bars. Unfortunately, I can also see a lot of people accidentally bending the gauge as they take their measurements, inadvertently throwing their measurements way off. If you know toe is split evenly across each axle beforehand, then using toe plates as described above is an excellent way to measure and track changes. Cross-Camber: A side-to-side difference in camber settings. * Always work from a level surface to avoid introducing error into your measurements. However, if you’re repairing steering and suspension parts, you may throw off your wheel alignment. Now you need to set up 1 jack stand at the back of your car, on the side behind the rear wheel and the other jack stand in front of the front wheel and off to the side. The most difficult and time-consuming part of the process is setting up your equipment to get accurate, repeatable results. If the front ruler shows a larger measurement than the rear, the wheel has toe-in. If you see that the tread on any one tire appears lower on one side of the car, or lower on one side of a tire than the other side, you have an alignment issue . Setting up my G35 on KW V3 coilovers didn’t just make it look better, it also reduced lap times by over 2-seconds once we got the alignment dialled in using Stillen adjustable camber arms and the DIY alignment tools you’re about to read about. (Small differences are the result of rounding.). The result forces the driver to make additional steering inputs to keep the car turning in the desired direction, especially in tight corners as the car's suspension rolls while cornering. You’ll still want to get a computerized alignment if this happens, but get to a shop — and avoid personal injury and vehicle damage — by using these DIY alignment tips. I purchased one of those life time alignments from Firestone back in 2007. The use of fingers to attach the gauge to the wheel is simply, a stroke of genius. Getting the toe right took quite a bit of time, as I kept having to reposition the frames every time I raised and lowered the car. Big Thanks To:We couldn't have written this article without expert help and advice from Maximum Motorsports owner Chuck Schwynoch, who trained us during several phone conversations and trips to local racetracks. This took quite a bit of time to achieve, not in the least because I kept snagging the corners of the frames with my pants. Highly recommend. How to Fix the Alignment on a Car (with Pictures) - wikiHow The first step to performing DIY wheel alignment is to know when your car needs one. Initial comparisons had us worried, as we saw a huge discrepancy in the camber figures between the Tenhulzen gauge and the Joe's Racing gauge. Refine your settling procedure until your results are repeatable before making any changes. - I am making a long trip, so I cannot wait and decided to do the REAR Alignment myself. First, we adjusted the width of the rack so that the inner rivets on the horizontal sections were slightly wider than the car, and made sure that both front and rear frames were the exact same width. Most gearheads understand the basic definitions of caster, camber, and toe, but when it comes to actually measuring or setting these wheel-alignment specs, the easy solution is to bring the car to a professional shop. Then rotate the wheel one turn and see how much run out you have. The procedure is straightforward but requires some care. Multiply whatever it says on the gauge by 2 to get the caster angle. Notice that the left, rear, and total weights did not change. Your First AlignmentWith some patience, it's actually very easy and cheap to set your wheel alignment at home. On factory steel wheels some wheels may have as much as 1/4″ which will ruin your measurements. For more information on balancing the car's weight per wheel, see Marlan Davis' story "The Science of Scaling Your Car" in the Sept. '03 issue, or on the This Month page of HOTROD.com right now. Due to the nature of how suspension systems work in production cars, there is a standard order of operations for aligning race cars: The ride height and corner weights had already been set, so we skipped right to the caster and camber. This particular CRX has had a colorful history of racing-related abuse, including being thrashed to a class victory in its first ever race before being rolled onto its roof on the very next day. Caused by the control arms and steering linkage traveling through arcs with unequal radiuses, bumpsteer results in the undesirable effect of the front wheels steering themselves without driver input as the suspension compresses and rebounds. DIY Wheel Alignment It’s Easier Than You Think! A tire's traction is always greatest when the largest part of its contact patch is in contact with the road surface, and static camber can be dialed in to keep the tire perpendicular as the chassis rolls in a turn. That’s a valid assumption, as DIY car alignment is considered an oxymoron. The toe gauge and rack were spot-on. Both the Quickset toe gauge and my Longacre toe plates showed the exact same combined-toe measurements as the Tenhulzen rack. You can also determine this by feeling for irregularities in … One neat feature of the gauge is that if you adjust the two rulers so that they sit all the way on the outside of the gauge, you can measure the toe in degrees. Because alignments require mind-numbing precision and frequent double-checking of numbers Martin Szwarc, regular driver of ProjectCRX, is helping me with this task. Why?? Record the measurements to speed up the process the next time. Martin also found that he could bend the gauge with relative ease and force the fingers into the tyre to throw the readings off even further. But if you enjoy the satisfaction of knowing how to do it yourself, or if you expect to be making enough alignment changes that taking your car to a shop every time would be expensive and impractical, you'll benefit from adding alignment skills to your mental toolbox. Up to you. Then stick the gauge on the wheel and read the number that shows up. Ackerman is desirable because it helps the front end turn in to the corner. The cause of this discrepancy turned out to be a combination of the gauge sliding about and our inability to get the fingers to grasp the wheel rim consistently. Your information will be collected and used in accordance with our  Privacy Policy, Wheel Alignment Guide - DIY Car Alignment. This was an indicator that nothing was bent and that I wouldn't have to touch the caster. The track width is the width of your car between the wheel hubs. All in all, the Tenhulzen 4-wheel alignment system requires quite a bit more finesse than your usual set of toe plates or bubble-level camber gauge. After months of chipping away at it a little each night, I had the front end in my 1974 Lotus Europa Twin-Cam Special buttoned up. A single "sandwich" goes under one tire. The new ball joints on the steering rack was a bit different than the ones that was on, so the measurements where a bit wrong. A range of wheel alignment tools for DIY and Professional use. QuickTrick™ Alignment 2019 4th Gen Series offers lighter weight aluminum Systems for Home, Pro, and DIY wheel Alignment. But because we could measure the toe of each wheel individually, we could adjust all four wheels at once and skip a lot of the guessing and checking. Adjust sway bar end links for the new distances to mounting points and reconnect. - Called local BMW dealer, they wanted $150! Many circle-track cars are set up to make lefthand turns with positive camber on the inside wheel and negative camber on the outside wheel. Now, there are a few ways to look at this. Posted Nonetheless, through practice and patience we persevered to get the CRX to -2.65 degrees Front and -3.5 degrees Rear that we wanted out of the car. Place the magnetic angle finder on the ground to zero it, then place it on the little L-bracket on the gauge. Although primarily known as late-model Mustang suspension specialists, Maximum Motorsports also sells several inexpensive alignment tools, including the caster/camber and bumpsteer gauges we used. Verify your procedure by weighing the car, jacking up one corner, and rechecking the corner-weights after settling. See Also. * Shoot for zero toe-in and no more than 0.015-0.020 inch of toe-out on bump, especially in the first inch of travel. Our road-race Mustang is set up with about 3 3/4 degrees of negative camber per side. These diagrams show the before-and after results of corner-weighting our Mustang. - Robertm5zw3 Toe-in is used on most drag and production cars to compensate for slack in the steering components so the front wheels track straight ahead under forward thrust. Wheel Alignment Guide - DIY Car Alignment With A Few Basic Tools And The Know-How Shared Here, You'll Never Again Be At The Mercy Of An Alignment Shop. The Tenhulzen gauge shortcuts this a bit with some 20-degree angles built into the sides of the gauge. That's it. See all 32 photos. Our testbed is a '90 Honda CRX Si prepared for endurance racing by the team at ProjectCRX.com. Toe-out is often used on road-race cars to improve corner-entry turn-in, but excessive toe-out can cause dartiness on straightaways and tire wear. I usually have to do a bit of trigonometry to get the actual degree measurement, so this is a real time-saver for me. Toe adjustments on individual wheels showed up exactly the same way on the Tenhulzen rack as it did on my other toe gauges as well. Tips on Setting Alignment* The effects of the various alignment settings interact, so adjust caster and camber first. On most alloy wheels they will have less than 1/32″ which is just fine. Toe must be set last. Do-it-yourself wheel alignment guide. Refer to the previous section about scaling and cross-weighting to learn how to level all your wheel pads before you begin your alignment. Alignment shops have very specialized and expensive tools to get the job done correctly. Bumpsteer Tips* Always set toe and caster prior to bumpsteering a car because caster affects the height of the steering arms, which in turn affects the bumpsteer measurements. Surprisingly, Martin and I had a lot of trouble getting the numbers to show up consistently at first. Discussion in 'Car Repairs / Maintenance' started by appletree, 8 Apr 2010. Hands-On - Tenhulzen 4-Wheel Alignment System Testing a clever DIY 4-wheel alignment system Posted by Roger on March 26, 2016 Now that we are done assembling and fiddling with the Tenhulzen 4-Wheel Alignment System, it's time to put it to good use. Wheel alignment is a basic Jeep or 4×4 truck maintenance need. There are dozens of DIY alignment hacks online but the simplest one we found was from Jalopnik, which recommends using two 24-inch pieces of … Knowing your car's weight is handy, but knowing how that weight is balanced is critical for a race car and can be measured easily with the Longacre Accuset scale system, which costs about $1,100. Most 4-wheeler owners’ manuals will come with alignment information in the back of the book. If the rear ruler shows a larger measurement than the front, the wheel has toe-out. This worked great on my RZR’s using shelving brackets. by Roger Though the actual measurement process was decidedly easier using the Tenhulzen gauge due to its fingers and re-zeroable digital angle finder. The intricate details that were put into both the frame and the handheld camber/caster/toe gauge take away many of the annoyances of doing alignments. * Remember that weight jacking cannot shift weight from front-to-back or left-to-right. Tilting it side to side can affect the camber readings. Cross-Caster: A side-to-side difference in caster settings. Car was running straight, nice print out of specs, no problems. A+ - leedon314 Fantastic seller – Great experience and post-sales support is wonderful. This will also help identify bent chassis parts in the future. Practice makes perfect, as they say. More importantly, the ability to measure against the true centerline of the car meant that, once we were done, the thrust angle of the car would be 0 and the steering wheel would point dead straight. If the top of the tire tilts inward as seen from the front, camber is negative; if it tilts outward, camber is positive. Up to a half-degree more positive caster on the passenger side is often used on production vehicles to compensate for the effect of crowned pavement and keeps the vehicle from pulling to the outside edge of the road. The first time, the alignment is perfect. The procedure is pretty straightforward, and I was relieved to see the caster angles on the left and right front wheels come within 0.1 degrees of each other. * Disconnect front and rear sway bars to eliminate the effect of sway-bar bind. The rim-grasping fingers, while brilliant, also take some getting used to with certain wheel-tyre combinations. Turn the digital gauge on and hold the zero button down until it reads 0.00. To use it, steer the wheels straight ahead (which is easy to get perfect if you have strung the car), then hold the gauge firmly against each wheel and turn the knob until the bubble level is centered. Toe Angle: Toe angle is the difference in track widths between the leading and trailing edges of the tires. Of course, all of this would be meaningless if the gauge wasn't accurate, so we took the time to check each measurement against my tried and true Joe's Racing bubble camber gauge and Longacre Quickset Toe gauge. Last year I overhauled an 5hp19fla automatic transmission and replaced. on March 26, 2016. Then turn the wheel until the angled cut on the other side is parallel with the side of the car. By clicking Sign Up, you agree to the  Terms of Use. Here's a diagram that helps illustrate what needs to be done: The funny looking box in the center is the car, the black rectangles are the wheels and the blue lines are the strings. Thread starter chard; Start date Apr 28, 2009; C. chard Well-known member. Page 1 of 3 1 2 3 Next > appletree. The tricky part was finding 12 flat washers that stacked up to be the same thickness. Even if you're not racing, having all your car's wheels pointed in the right directions is a good idea, and you might be surprised at how much better your car drives after being aligned, not to mention the fact that your tires will probably last longer once you learn how to do your own alignments. Yes and no. Note that the front and rear measurements may be different due to variations in track width, but the conduit ensures that the strings always remain parallel to each other. DIY car Wheel alignment. This gave me a difference of 0.4" overall or 0.2" on each side. 2×4 ; Laser level clamped to rear wheel, use the ruler to measure the front and rear edge of the front wheel to figure out the angle. At the same time the flimsy aluminum construction of the gauge and rack led to a litany of do-overs before we had accurate measurements on all four wheels. Caster was dead-on with my bubble gauge as well. Traditionally, measuring caster involves a somewhat complex procedure that involves turning plates and a camber gauge. * Develop a settling routine to use after each weight adjustment, either by rolling the car back and forth onto the scales or jouncing the suspension. Find 2 places on your wheel that are 180 degrees apart and have the same run out measurement. My passenger side has quite a bit more camber than it should and id like to try correcting it myself … Never know if there may be a bent axle tube, let’s say there’s a difference between center to center of the left side compared to the right side wheels, may have taken a hit somewhere in its life. After a few tries we had both gauges reading within 0.1 degrees of each other. Car Alignment Explained I don't know of any other system that comes close to delivering this level of functionality for $500. Then came the most tedious part - squaring the strings. That said, I believe that the value for money is excellent. We just couldn't get the fingers to grasp the wheel consistently. How-to: Jeep 4×4 Front Wheel Alignment. All we needed to do was to fold out the rulers on the sides of the gauge and get the difference between the measurements. * Some toe-out on the inside tire in rebound can help corner entry by creating an Ackerman-like effect as the car turns in. This is definitely true if you intend to drive at Pocono Raceway. Getting this right without doing dozens of test drives ultimately ended up saving a lot of time and frustration. Sure, you could probably DIY your own string alignment rack and even make your own copy of the very clever camber/caster/toe gauge (little known secret - the fingers are available as off the shelf parts made by SPC). Rob Siegel. The goal of this post is to demonstrate that a DIY guy like many in this forum could perform 4-wheel alignment at your garage (home) using this simplified method. - yonmoor Excellent engineered camber/caster instrument, easy to use. Fast Shipping! Only physically moving or adding weight can change the distribution within the car. Whether you are doing a 2- or 4-wheel alignment, you have two choices for making an affordable set of turntables. With the Tenhulzen system (as with most string-based alignment systems), this is achieved by moving the front and rear frames so that the distance between the center of the hub and the string is the same across the left and right sides of the car. Aligning a car may seem like one of those voodoo sciences that makes no sense if you've never actually seen it done, but as we learned by doing in preparing this article, the process is really quite straightforward if approached logically. 10 February 2020. If you move the rack side to side so that the two distances marked "A" are exactly the same and the two distances marked "B" are exactly the same, the strings will be perfectly parallel against the true centerline of the car. Wheel alignment on the go with 14 … The next step was front wheel alignment. The torque specification for alignment bolts appears to be as much as humanly possible ft-lbs. Suspension modifications, normal chassis and steering linkage wear, off-pavement trail pounding and the use of oversized tires can each impact the front wheel alignment. Words like "caster," "camber," and "toe" are enough to deter anyone from delving any further into the topic. For example, tilting the front or rear of the car up or down can affect caster measurements. If you don't need this advanced data, you can still use the information here about how to level the scales before moving on to the basic at-home alignment procedure in the following pages. A+ seller and unit. - dirtboy720 Super 4 Wheel Alignment System!! If Tenhulzen were to re-engineer this kit using thick aluminum or steel plate like my Longacre alignment tools, I would probably revise this recommendation to include absolute beginners. A wheel alignment can seem like black magic. DIY Wheel Alignment It’s Easier Than You Think! Most critical is having a flat, level spot to work from, and as you'll read, we've come up with a simple way to accomplish that so you can set alignment in your garage, shop, or even at the racetrack. Excessive camber results in accelerated wear on the inner or outer shoulders of the tires, but most street cars can benefit from up to 1-1.5 degrees of negative camber. I tried doing the wheel alignment myself. Very accurate toe measurements can be achieved by the string method, which involves stretching a perfectly squared rectangle of string around it to create a known point from which to measure. DIY or QuickTrick Alignment . DIY front wheel alignment. * Center the steering wheel before measuring and setting the toe, and make all adjustments without moving it. Then we pulled the strings out and hooked them onto the frame so they sat slightly higher than the centers of the wheels. During our alignment session, we found a wealth of time-saving features cleverly engineered into the system. Cardboard turntables can be … Mercedes DIY Wheel Alignment . Many oval-track racers run even higher amounts of cross-caster on the outside wheel to help the car turn down to a lefthand corner. When the vehicle starts pulling to one side – or after a sharp impact with a curb – most drivers suspect that the wheels might be out of alignment. The string is squared by using a steel ruler to take measurements from fixed points on the chassis, such as the center of the wheel hubs or a machined flat on a wheel, and then sliding the conduit side-to-side until the string is an equal distance from the reference point on each side of the car. It will take several minutes of walking around the car making smaller and smaller adjustments until you get the string square. Just read the metric side and remember that 1mm = 0.1 degrees. Finally, we set up the strings and rack so that we could get an accurate 4-wheel toe measurement on the car. Although this probably has to do something with the fact that Martin weighs 200 lbs and is mostly made of muscle, there is something to be said about the relative flimsiness of the gauge compared to some of the other camber gauges I've used in the past.

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