legacycentral bbs

So I replaced the strut mounts on Patti this weekend. As we all know, by removing the struts, you lose the front camber settings, unless you mark them, and even then it's not quite accurate.

Well, the genius that did my alignment that I got right after my wheel bearing project had my front camber at 0 dead on for the left and -0.4 for the right. I guess he thought I was going to be running NASCAR or something

Anyway, so when I did that yesterday, I didn't even mark anything. I just took it apart, swapped the mounts, reinstalled the struts and put the camber pretty close to where they were last time. I figured, I'm going to go straight to the alignment rack when I get to work, so what does it matter?

So, I had the guy put the car up there and set it all up, and ya know what my before camber settings were? Left :0 dead on, and right: -0.3!!! Is that pure luck or am I just that good??

I actually told the guy to set my camber at -0.2 on both sides, since I do take corners a slight bit faster than the average driver, and that isn't enough to wear anything out much faster.

#1 alignment misnomer - Camber doesn't really kill tires. Toe kills tires. Most alignment shops fudge the machine to save time, and rarely ACTUALLY zero out toe. They often adjust toe, THEN camber. Half the time, they don't set the machine up correctly, and that effects the output too.

Every .1 degree of Camber is .4 degrees of toe that needs to be corrected.

When I swapped my struts, my camber was close, my castor was perfect and my toe was gross.

Now, -1.3 degrees, .01 degree toe-out, +4 degrees castor.

.2 degrees is almost un-noticeable.

The SEL-GP car owned by Radial Tire Co. runs 4 degrees of camber all around, something like .02 degrees toe-out, with no sway bars, and their street tires (245 width) have lasted an outrageous number of miles for a car driven as hard as that.

Camber doesn't kill. Not on our cars at least. Toe Kills.

But good work getting the settings almost the same! That's a good feeling, huh? Just eyeballing it and you get it ALMOST perfect, that's awesome!