Quote:
Originally Posted by Racer Boy
When I rebuilt my suspension, I just eyeballed everything enough to drive it without damaging the tires. Amazingly, when I had it aligned, everything was nearly spot-on. Nothing like dumb luck!
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That is awesome, back in march when i did some suspension work (new LCA in the back) when I drove the car to the alignment shop, the back end was wandering around like the devil, it was terrible and scary and I couldn't go over 45. Luckily it was only about 2 miles away.
I don't go to that shop anymore for a few reasons:
Second to last time they did an alignment, they didn't follow my instructions and they set the back up exactly the same as the front, and got aggravated when I asked them to put it back on the rack and set it the way that I asked (and that I had written down and given to them)
Then last time, after installing new control arms in back, they aligned it, and when I went to pick it up, they charged me for 3 hours of labor ($300+ instead of $75 or whatever the regular price was), said the adjustments on my rennline adjustable toe arms were seized up, and so they dropped the arms and just loosened off one of the ends to make the adjustments and it took 3 hours. I have a toe lockout kit but I also have the original toe eccentrics that I could have brought down, had they just called me which could have avoided all this.
Also, since they were the ones to have adjusted those arms the last 3 times (they have done my last 3 shop alignments), and the arms and the jam nuts are all rounded and marked up from by using pliers instead of the proper sized box wrenches. Then when I was doing the track inspection for my next track day, one of the jam nuts was only finger tight... And also both of the rear camber eccentrics were far below the torque spec (75 ft/lb I think) they were way under. At this point I decided to learn to try and do the alignments myself.
I will say, those arms were pretty seized up as I learned when I did this most recent alignment myself, the instructions say to use anti-seize but this wasn't done back when they were first installed dang it
I was able to make all the adjustment I needed, but had to use lots of Kroil and had to take one of the arms off and put two box wrenches on it, and stand on them to get one of the joints to loosen up.
Lesson learned, use anti-seize, I guess all the heat and dust and water splashing up there gets into those joints and freezes them up. Plus the arms are a combo of steel and aluminum parts which probably didn't help...
I'm ordering new parts and the next time I get back there I am going to replace the toe arms, and use lots of anti-seize...