I don't agree with most of these comments. My lower control arms move freely throughout nearly the entire range of adjustment of my Hotchkis adjustable strut rods. All the way up and down, in other words they move freely through their full range of motion until you get all the way to the end of the adjustments of the strut rods, forward or back.
Telling people that if their strut rods were correct in the first place is fantasy! They are a compromise from the factory so little old ladies can park these cars in parking lots easier. In stock form, they wander all over the highway. The factory strut rods are almost never the correct length for any type of performance or modern driving, and need the adjustment to allow the lower control arm to move forward in many cases, not all. Yes, this can result in increased caster.
I had firm feel tubular upper control arms on my '68 a-body. I was told by my alignment guy that the most positive caster I could get without starting to increase the camber or start to bring in the top of the wheels was .5 degree positive camber. My strut rods are straight, all my suspension rebuilt with quality components and I still couldn't get more than .5 degrees of positive caster without gaining excessive camber.
Once I installed the Hotchkis adjustable strut rods and verified that the lower control arm was not binding while the torsion bar was out, I was amazed at how far the lower control arm can freely move through its range of motion. Can you take it to far, of course, but with my lower control arms set-up with the Hotchkis measurement, my car now handles like it is on rails, tracks down the road way better, and all I did was a driveway alignment. Once I get my motor and transmission swap done, I'll take the car in and have it properly aligned.
Adjustable strut rods are an amazing item when used in the right application, Mopars happen to be one of those applications!
Feel free to disagree if you like, but the purpose of the strut rods is not to adjust caster. Also, little old ladies had nothing to do with the original alignment specs- the power steering cars use the same caster spec and they can be turned with one finger. These cars had bias ply tires from the factory, and therefore required different tire alignment specs than radials do. Which is why the caster settings were what they were. It's also why a lot of these cars "in stock form" wander all over the road. It's because they aren't actually stock. If you run radial tires with a bias-ply alignment, the results are less than great.
Don't get me wrong, I use adjustable strut rods on all of my Mopars. I use them because I also use polyurethane LCA bushings, which do not locate the LCA's the same way as the original rubber LCA bushings did. Which, as far as I'm concerned, makes the use of adjustable strut rods mandatory with poly LCA bushings. Also, pretty much all of the aftermarket strut rod bushings, even the "quality" ones, are the wrong thickness when you compare them to the stock bushings. Which means when you replace all the suspension bushings its not uncommon to find out that your strut rods are no longer the right length. I have seen cars using the stock strut rods and original bushings that had the LCA's properly located and not binding. And I've seen cars that had the LCA's pretty well bound up with the stock strut rods. Some worked better than others, but that is why I qualified my previous statements by saying that if the strut rods were properly locating the LCA's nothing would be gained with adjustable strut rods. There are plenty of cars out there that were, and are, aligned just fine with the stock strut rods. Just because your car wasn't, doesn't make it so for all of them.
You have to match all of your components, plain and simple. Tubular UCA's change the suspension geometry. Installing new bushings, especially poly bushings, can change the suspension geometry. So, it shouldn't be surprising that the stock, non-adjustable strut rods don't always work with tubular UCA's. Or poly bushings. Or even replacement rubber bushings, because they are commonly a different size than the originals were. Suspension is a system. All of the components work together. If you start making changes, you have to make sure everything else still works the way its supposed to.
Well I meant that meaning the rest of the alignment went well and had no issue.
I can't or rather won't at this point, I paid $200 for lifetime alignments and any Firestone.
That's why I was thinking of taking it to the other Firestone shop in town and see if they get any better luck with it.
Your last alignment didn't even "go", let alone "go well". It's not aligned.
You actually can run -.9º camber on the street. I do on my Challenger, and probably have run that much for over 10k miles. On the street you can typically run up to about -1º camber with radials before you end up with tire wearing issues. But the fact that the other side is positive is a disaster. It would be one thing if both sides were equal, but not to the spec you wanted. To have them be that different points to a problem. It could just be the tech that tried to align it didn't have the slightest idea what he was doing. Or something could be bent.
Good luck with Firestone. Most of the chains will only adjust the alignment to whats in the computer, which is the factory original specs intended for bias-ply tires. Sometimes you can reason with the tech and explain that the factory specs are actually dangerous for modern tires, but sometimes they're just morons.
