Need help with front end -Alignment
The best alignment is what the factory calls for. Adjustable control arms and strut rods are great and make the alignment easier, but don't change the specs. Point them the right way and save tire wear.
Well, argue if you will. Radial tires or bias tires make a difference in handling, not alignment. Alignment is geometry, nothing more. It is the angles that apply the tire to the road. I have worked in automotive service most of my life. I'm not making observations based on conjecture. Can you change the alignment to do different things? Of course you can. Will it lead to excess or uneven tire wear? Yes it will. I won't argue that you can change angles to help steering or tracking, but what you gain in one place you lose in another. My Dart is aligned to factory specs and I have no performance issues whatsoever. My tires wear smoothly and evenly. The only excess tire wear I have is in the rear wheels, and that has nothing to do with alignment and everything to do with power.
Sorry, but this is flat out wrong. The original alignment specs were for bias ply's, and that has EVERYTHING to do with how the cars were aligned. Wear patterns on bias ply's vs radials are completely different, not to mention handling characteristics.
The whole point of an alignment is to keep the car driving straight and maintain the best contact patch for your tires to improve stability. An alignment to original specs with radial tires will do you a serious disservice when it come to handling. While it may not wear tires, it absolutely decreases the handling performance of your car.
This is true even with 14 or 15" radials, although its really true if you're running 17's or larger. If you upgrade to more modern sizes and tire compounds, you may even see abnormal tire wear with the original specs. The difference in compound and side wall stiffness is HUGE, like comparing hockey pucks to silly putty.
The SKOSH chart posted above is a great recommendation for alignments with radial tires, and a good place to start. I'd say that the chart's caster recommendations are great for manual steering, and low for power steering. No reason not to run +4 degrees of caster on a power steering car, even for the "granny" setting. That's about the top end of a manual steering caster setting though, as it will make it a little too "stable", the wheels will get a little hard to turn.
With my 17" rims and tires I've run as much as -1 degree of camber without seeing any abnormal tire wear, although I drive a lot of mountain roads. Modern performance tires are DESIGNED to run negative camber, and tolerate it well. A set of BFG T/A's will not do as well, and I don't think I'd run more than -.5 degrees camber with them. Negative camber keeps the inside wheel upright during a corner. While its under cornering load the tire will increase the camber on the inside (loaded) wheel. You want your dynamic camber to be close to 0 to keep the best contact patch, starting slightly negative means that under cornering load the tire will move toward 0 and maintain more contact with the road on the most important tire. If you start out with positive camber you'll get more positive camber as you load the inside wheel during cornering, and you'll put less tire on the ground. Less traction. The ONLY reason the factory spec calls for positive camber is because the bias ply tires can not tolerate negative camber. They don't have the sidewalls to maintain it. It has nothing to do with the best geometry for the CAR, and only to do with what the tire technology at the time could deal with.
Toe in is just to "take up the slack" in your steering joints, as the slack will cause the tires to toe out during driving. You want your dynamic toe, the actually toe while you're driving down the road, to be close to zero. If you're running modern tires and new steering components, 1/16" toe in is plenty. If your steering stuff is a little more worn, up to about an 1/8" will work great.
My Challenger is currently set up with -.7* camber, +4 degrees caster, and 1/16" toe in. For a cruiser a little less camber would be good, say between -.25 and -.5 degrees.
You may have to take it somewhere other than a "chain" tire or wheel place to get that alignment though, a lot of the chains will only let the guys put in the alignment thats in the computer, which is the stock spec. No amount of arguing that those specs are for 1950's tire technology will help, the factory specs for our cars were outdated even when they came off the assembly line.
