DIY 4 Wheel Alignment - V - Pukka Kit

[cptsideways]

A local friend owns a local garage (& a Cossie Rally car too) recently purchased a full on pukka 4 wheel laser alignment kit all £2K worth , with camber caster, toe etc etc. Having read the instructions I can see why he was a bit flummoxed. Not the simplest thing to get your head round.

Now I have had my own DIY system that consists of a £4.99 laser alignment tool (I've checked it's straight), a piece of wood with some marks on & some assitance from a CAD system to put the correct aligment marks on said piece of wood. Only thing I could'nt measure accurately was camber so I used the both look the same rule of thumb. Not great but it seemed to work rather well & the cars handling (an MX5) has been commented on as quite remarkable. I've used it on various cars of mine with much success.

So I offered to get to grips with the pukka kit, knowing already what I had to do, just needed to the manual on how to go about doing it.

Once you've got yer head round the concept it is rather easy or I found it to be at least. First thing I did was to measure exactly what my "DIY" measurents were.

The car is set up for drifting so somewhat different to normal settings:

Rear End-Minimal rear camber 2.0 deg ish guessed, -1.0 deg toe.
Front End-Maximum Camber 3 deg guessed, 1.5 deg toe out

What I actually had was
Rear Camber 1.5 & 1.6 deg, toe -2deg (-1deg both sides)
Front Camber 2.7 & 2.7 deg, toe +3 deg (1+2deg)
Not bad for a £4.99 home made kit , it was also dead straight down the centre line too!, so I was slightly chuffed at it's accuracy. It also drives straight as a die too. So not a bad start.

Then I'm onto setting the cambers right, whilst maintaining the correct/same toe & front-rear alignment, fairly easy to do accurately.

The end result is I have my desired settings with the same & chosen cambers, desired toe etc. Re-checked with my DIY kit & it's spot on for accuracy much to my surprise, only I'd need to be more accurate with the camber. (£90 buys a digital angle meter used for building work)

A brief drive has shown it to be near perfect in the handling stakes, though I'm tempted to add a bit more toe at the front & see what happens.

So a very interesting evening, I really think I have learnt something useful & know that little bit more as to exactly what is going on in the wheel & tyre dept when I'm looking out the side windows.