Front end alignment at home
I set mine at home on a level slab in the garage as I do not trust the local shops to crank on my new refurbed A-Arms. Have not yet found a shop that will let me under and supervise so.
Most but toe, is eyeball. You can get caster close by adjusting to max. Camber is pretty easy to eyeball and if you choose, a small level can help, the caster will naturally sort of follow the camber setting short of Toe adjustment, and stringing it out for the toe will get you very close. This is based on pure stock bushings and factory ride height dimensions.
Have been out driving 3 years now with no tire wear. Granted only about 1k or so a year. Most Mopar cars I have aligned on a rack have followed closely unless the owner wanted a specific setting.
This can work with stock bushings and close to stock ride heights. It can even work with the offset UCA bushings in stock UCA's, you still can't really get yourself in too much trouble because there isn't much of a range for your adjustment. Really only a few degrees, and the camber bolts are all you really have to work with if you have all stock parts (unless you start changing the ride height, which most people want to set for cosmetic reasons). Sure the toe changes when you change the camber/caster and it has to be adjusted after, but you don't use the toe to change your caster/camber settings.
The problem with this is you don't actually know what your caster numbers really are. You'll know if your camber is relatively close, but even with that you're not going to eyeball down closer than a few tenths of a degree. With stock bushings, depending on your ride height, you might barely have any positive caster at all. If you end up with cross caster you can end up with a pull, and you won't really know where it's coming from. Could be caster, could be a little cross camber, could be a little of both in the same direction. And if you have some kind of damage you don't know about it can throw you out of range, and again you'd only know if it pulled. And if it pulls left you might not notice if you drive crowned roads. But heck, the stock components have very little adjustment, so you can't even set up a whole lot of cross caster without doing the adjustments opposite of each other. So, yeah, if the car drives straight and you got the toe relatively close it's probably not going to wear tires. Toe is it the biggest tire wearing adjustment anyway. Camber only starts wearing tires if you're over a degree in one direction or the other, that's pretty obvious. Caster doesn't really wear tires. So just because you aren't wearing tires doesn't mean your alignment is right, the car could still be handling poorly because of lousy caster numbers without wearing out the tires.
The other issue is, it really only works with stock suspension stuff. That limited range and number of adjustments means a lot of what you get for your alignment is just what you get, there isn't a lot you can do about it other than changing your ride height to get beack in range unless you need to replace damaged parts. If you have adjustable UCA's, adjustable strut rods, poly or Delrin bushings, significantly lowered ride heights, etc, you need to know what the numbers are because you have the possibility of being a lot further off. There's a much larger range of adjustment, and more ways to adjust things too. That doesn't necessarily mean you can't get lucky and still set max caster and eyeball it and have it drive straight, I did that on my Duster. But what I
didn't know is that by setting max caster I ended up with more than +8* of caster. No kidding. Didn't pull, didn't wear tires, camber was a little less than -1*, toe was right on. And it drove darn straight too! Sure took some elbow grease to turn the wheel though!
The other thing is, at 1k miles a year it would take a year to notice any strange tire wearing patterns unless you completely screwed up the toe setting. If your alignment is only a little off, the odd tire wear could take over a year to show up. And with mileage like that, even if you were a little off you'd still "time out" on your tires before an abnormal wear pattern caused problems. So what I'm saying is, yes, that
can work, but it's because you have stock suspension parts and low annual mileage. And a decent knowledge of suspension parts, I'm sure there's plenty of folks that can't "eyeball it" and have it be close, you obviously know what you're looking for.
