Adjusting camber & toe.

[blakeya]

As per title,

I am DIY setting my front camber & toe angles but which one should i set first? The camber or the toe?

Help much appreciated.

Andy

[Blatman]

Won't matter. One may affect the other, but it may not. Measure, adjust, measure etc. The margin of error will gradually decrease as you adjust, until you have them both where you want them. I doubt you'll have to readjust either setting more than twice though, unless you're a *long* way out with both to start with...

[Terry Everall]

i normally do camber first then reset toe in /out

[Al Yupright]

Adjusting the camber will make the toe go out quite a lot.

Adjusting the toe will make little difference to the camber.

Camber first  

[Matt Seabrook]

Adjust camber first but keep bring the wheel back to zero toe by turning the steering wheel to bring the toe back to the straight ahead position. Once the camber is correct adjust the toe to what you want and you will find the camber comes back into spec. Toe can effect camber if you run lost of caster but seeing as you have not asked about caster I guess you are running standard wishbones which don’t have lost of cater on them anyway.

HTH

[blakeya]

Cheers chaps,

Help much appreciated once again.

regards

Andy

[Bean]

What's the best way to measure camber and toe?

Sorry for the dumb question but I recently changed my steering gaiters and haven't set the toe up again.

[Matt Seabrook]

What's the best way to measure camber and toe?

Sorry for the dumb question but I recently changed my steering gaiters and haven't set the toe up again.

With one of these

[Blatman]

[Westfieldman]

QUOTE

With one of these

Matt as I understand it these machines only align the four wheels with each other so the chassie could be 5 or 10 degres out of line with the center line of the aligned wheels if you see what I mean

I do mine the hard way from projected center lines from the center of the chassie

Setting the wheel base eaqual both side

The width of the track equal each side of the center line

Then the camber toe and caster [with an ever decreasing error for each of them until I am happy]

[Blatman]

QUOTE

Matt as I understand it these machines only align the four wheels with each other so the chassie could be 5 or 10 degres out of line with the center line of the aligned wheels if you see what I mean

You understand wrong. I've had my car on Matts machine, and it's ace. I take my car to Matts whenever I can just to use that machine, and his place is 250+ miles away...

[Bazzer]

Matt as I understand it these machines only align the four wheels with each other so the chassie could be 5 or 10 degres out of line with the center line of the aligned wheels if you see what I mean

You understand wrong. I've had my car on Matts machine, and it's ace. I take my car to Matts whenever I can just to use that machine, and his place is 250+ miles away...

So how does it know where the suspension pickup points are and thus the centre line of the chassis ?

Can't see how it can do this but would be good if it did, as it would save a lot of time doing it the way Paul mentioned.

Bazzer

[Blatman]

It has cameras and laser alignment stuff that's all very clever. It works, trust me. Or trust Matt. Do you think he spunked 20K on a machine that doesn't work, when his living depends on it?

[Westfieldman]

Caling Matt

Still belive it aligns four wheels to each other not to the chassie

[Matt Seabrook]

Evnin all, don’t ask me how it does it but one of the screens shows me how off centre the axles are. All I know is it works very well and one of my customers now sets FTDs and class records after I have set his Westfield at first and now his OMS single seater up. The first time we set the S.S. up we used OMS supplied geo settings which did not look right to me but went with what they said and the car was not that special the next time he let me loose with what I thought it should be and got quite close to our final settings. I am not saying you can’t do what I can with my machine but to get the results I can manually would take hours and hours and toe can be measured down to a 1/10 of a mm. I can tell you if the axles are central the scrub radius is even set back is correct axle alignment is out on the rear how much bump steer you have toe and camber settings front and rear and caster settings on the front diagonal measurements acherman readings caster trail SAI and included angels etc etc in about 20 mins. It’s what top end body shops would use after the car has been jigged to make sure everything is straight. Comes to that one of my best customers for alignment is the local Nissan body shop so cant be doing a bad job can I.