Old school alignment guys; gauge mount idea. What am I missing?
I'm curious did they charge you by the hour or a flat fee?
Flat rate.
I see you have slip plates under your car. What are they made of?
MDS whiteboard panel, I think. Been a little while. I cut squares and smeared grease between 2 sets on the smooth white side. I also stack a pair under each back tire. I wasn't sure how durable they would be, but so far I haven't seen any indication they are coming apart and I have used them several times now.
How do you measure your caster swings so that you can calculate caster? Are you swinging 40 degrees and multiplying by 1.5?
Do you mean when I used the digital angle finder? Don't recall right now what formula I used. I will see if I can figure out what it was.
The Longacre tool has an angle on the end of it that I am attempting to match in this case. I took a page from
@racerjoe (
post) and put some tape on the steering column this time. Spent some time eyeballing the angled end of the tool and the body and then marked the tape when it matched so I could repeat it. Then I rolled it the other way and repeated. I am assuming it is 20 degrees both ways, but figured it wasn't all that important to know for sure as long as I could match it. Zero the gauge one way and then read the results the other, so no calculating or multiplying by anything in this case.
Not getting repeatable results yet so I need to fine tune my process. First check was more just an eyeball of the angle of the wheels, this time I tried harder. This time caster/camber was 5.25/-0.375 for the right and 4.25/-0.25 for the left. I think, it's late and the day was full so I could be remembering wrong. Figured since I need to work on the process, I wasn't going to change anything until I had a better handle on it. So I didn't bother recording it either.
Planning to mess with checking for runout too. Just to see if I can and if I find anything.