Steers like Crap
- Thread starter tooslow
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tooslow
Well-Known Member
Excellent pics
I am pulling the engine out now . i will take a look , I bet I will find cracks . This is my 7 th year of taking it to road racing track and the steering has gotten worse. I have concentrated on the components but not the mounts
I am pulling the engine out now . i will take a look , I bet I will find cracks . This is my 7 th year of taking it to road racing track and the steering has gotten worse. I have concentrated on the components but not the mounts
tooslow
Well-Known Member
Most alignment shops will not adjust the front end to other than stock specs.
I usually find a kid and pay him cash under the table , it works but i cany always
How do you guys get your front ends aligned to custom specs?
I usually find a kid and pay him cash under the table , it works but i cany always
How do you guys get your front ends aligned to custom specs?
tooslow
Well-Known Member
tooslow
Well-Known Member
I will try = 6.5 Caster
I am also running 275/35/18s
I was wrong initially
I am also running 275/35/18s
I was wrong initially
You might not, but especially if you're road racing you'll want to check for them. The factory quality control on the welding was pretty poor, some K frames have great welding, but a lot, especially on the A-bodies, seem pretty bad. I fully seam weld and reinforce all of my K frames now. The steering box mount gets fully boxed, and the LCA pivot sleeves get reinforced as well.
Yup, that is exactly what I have found. All the major name shops will only do factory alignment specs. A lot of them will also not do an alignment if you have aftermarket parts that were not installed by that shop.
I do my own alignments now. I have a set of turntables and slip plates, toe plates, and use a FastTrax caster camber gauge. The first few times definitely took some trial and error, but with some practice it's not that bad. And I can set whatever specs I like whenever I want. Buying the turn plates used and everything else new it still paid for itself with a couple of alignments.
I figured that was a typo, I didn't think you fit 30" tall tires on the front of your car.
You may not be able to get that much caster, it depends on your control arms. Even most non-adjustable tubular UCA's won't get you to +6.5° caster. I have SPC adjustable UCA's on my car to get those specs. Currently I'm running -1° camber, +6.5° caster and between 1/16" and 1/8" toe in. I have a set of toe plates and use a tape measure, so I can't really say it's 3/32". Just that it falls between 1/16" and 1/8".
67Dart273
Well-Known Member
If you are not physically diminished (I am and especially now) you can align it yourself. You need something for turning plates, google that, there are many ways. You need something to measure wheel/ tire tilt AKA "camber" and you can easily calculate caster. Or pony up and buy a caster camber gauge. You need a way to measure tow, also several ways to do so. Tow is especially easy if you can drum up a "helper" for a few minutes.
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WHAT YOU NEED
1...A flat place to work. I did mine by !!! leveling up !!! my car trailer !!! and using that for a work platform, "alignment rack."
2...You need a CAMBER gauge. This is nothing more than an accurate level from which you can figure degrees of tilt. You can buy these all over the place. You can make your own or buy them reasonably. I found an old Ammco caster camber gauge on CL with some other stuff
My old Ammco gauge
You are ACTUALLY measuring CAMBER. CASTER is derived by measuring the difference in camber change when turning the wheels out and then in. Very very very simple.
You turn the wheels out 20 degrees by means of a simple protractor. You measure the camber. You turn them IN 20 degrees and again measure camber. Take the difference between the two, and multiply by 1.5 This is your CASTER figure.
For radials you want the tires IN at the top, as opposed to the OLD figures for bias tires which had the tops of the tires OUT at the tops. What you want is "negative" camber with radials
3....You need some method of turning the wheels and if you search this, (DIY alignment, etc) there are lots of ways, including pieces of greased sheet metal, using salt between tiles, I don't know what all
4...Toe: You need a method of marking the tires to obtain the rotating plane. A simple scribe made from a nail and scrap lumber works, you can mark the tire itself or pieces of masking tape. Then just use a tape front and rear of the tires, if you have two guys. I don't I "remade" a toe gauge I bought the pieces of
Nothing but a fancy tape measure:
Read this:
Turn of the screw: front end alignment for performance on classic Mopars
"What we" go by around here is the "skosh chart" at the bottom of the page
Some other links
Need help with front end -Alignment
DIY Alignment?
Doing an alignment in the driveway on a 72 scamp
Lawdie my arth - a - ritis!!!
There is TONS of caster / camber gauges available reasonably, and you can make them
https://www.google.com/search?newwi...sedr...0...1c.1.64.img..0.24.1379.DJVuA6nNi2c
Anywhere that won't or does not know how to properly align your front end, you leave as quickly as you can and find an old guy who knows what he is doing. This is one of the most important things you can do for your car. My guy works on anything and drag races and road races. I have seen open wheeled race cars on his rack. Take the time and go the extra mile to find that guy. Or give up and do it yourself, see post #32. The best you will get is probably Typ street perf, second line on the chart, but that will be fine. You will only be able to get 1.5 to 2.0 caster positive on an "A" body with good components and everything else in spec. But if everything else is good it will drive just fine.
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abodyjoe
Well-Known Member
what brand frontend parts did you use? our dart had driven me crazy for a few years not steering right.. felt darty which almost felt like play in the front end.. had a couple alignments done on it (no one would put it exactly where i wanted it) and it never got better,,,, i've don't plenty of these front ends over the years and never had this issue. i converted to big bolt disc with all moog parts like i have done in the past.... so over time i read about people having problems with moog ball joints lately.. i'm pretty confident the upper joints are ok brcause they are RMS arms and bill uses good parts so i deceded to change out the lower ball joints.. didn't see anything wrong with them but as soon as i pulled the car out of the garage i knew it was fixed... a brand new moog ball joint was bad and binding for some reason.. sent it in for an alignment and man the thing steers liek it should. we put more miles on the car in 2020 then we had over the previous 4 years combined.. so much nicer to drive. may be something to look at for you.
AJ/FormS
68 Formua-S fastback clone 367/A833/GVod/3.55s
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When I was an alignment tech, I found certain brands of balljoints to be too tight when brand new, just like you say. And sometimes/often, they stayed too tight.. The following story is on a car with pre rack-and-pinion steering;
When a particular car came back for the third time,with an unhappy customer, I knew something was up. I put the sensors up, again, and saw that the caster/camber/thrust angle, etc; were all good, and same as I had last set them.
So I put some tools together and headed out on the road. It didn't matter where I set the tire pressures, nor where I put the toe, nor how tight or loose the sector was adjusted, nor if I flipped the PS belt off; it never got better.
What I figured was happening was that there must be a tight component in there, probably a BJ, and that the extra turning-resistance was causing the steering to stay in whatever direction it was last steered. If that was not straight ahead, then the toe was off, and the car self-steered.
Since no roadway is dead flat, and rare is the day we have calm winds, steering dead ahead almost never happens. With "normal" resistance in the BJs, the tires are constantly being pulled this way and that way, but for the most part it averages out to whatever position the car is being steered in.
Back in the shop, I popped the idler arm off, to be able to isolate the bad side or sides, and immediately found the tight NOT-Moog, recently replaced LBJ. I had put it there.
This was not the first time I had had trouble with that brand.
I got paid by the hour, so I asked my boss how many more times, he wanted to pay me to uninstall brand new junk parts? It was totally a false economy just to save the customer a couple of bucks, and then to get a reputation of this sort of come-backs.
He got the point.
After that I was very particular about the tightness and smoothness of every New part I installed, especially off-brand stuff.
And we lost some business. I was also a government authorized automotive and light-truck safety inspector. And certain small business used car dealers would send their vehicles to us for inspection. And whenever I would condemn these components, they would want the cheapest junk we could find, to be installed.
So I asked my boss, if he wanted to get a reputation of installing cheap junk? I mean when a used car buyer buys a used car, and the parts wear out in 50 miles, what are they gonna do? They go back to the seller and complain. And the seller passes the buck back to the installer. That's us. And that's me. And when that gets around the neighborhood, what's gonna happen boss, to your business, and to my job?
He got the point.
So we lost some business from these petty sellers. But as it got around that we were no longer doing thatchit, other business started coming in. And I sorta became one of the few go-to guys, in our small community, for diagnosing difficult steering problems.
In the end, it had been a good decision. We got a better, more loyal, customer base; and the money kept rolling in.
To be fair to Moog, I never ever had a problem with Moog parts, and they went the distance. I installed Moogs in my Barracuda, in 1999, they now have over 125,000 not easy, miles on them. I got out of that line of work, before Moog and TRW started outsourcing.
Lemmee tell you about the K-car that came in, and I had on the rack about 3 or 4 times; Ok I will.
Finally I wanted to meet the owner. Ok. Here was a monster of a man, 6ft tall and 400 plus pounds, and his wife of maybe 250.
In a K-car.
Boss, I said, what were you thinking?
Those are my parents.
Doh!
Ok get me 4 of the heaviest duty strut springs you can find. You know they won't be stiff enough, but that's the best I can do. On the final alignment, I put all the sandbags we had on the front floors, and pails of lead besides. A week later they were back.
Oh lordy; what now?
They just popped in to say thank you!
abodyjoe
Well-Known Member
In theory I totally agree with this. But here's the thing. You can have someone that has 20 years of alignment experience now that has never aligned something like these cars. And for liability reasons, the major tire and alignment shops won't use anything other than factory specs now, even if they have some employees that know better than just "putting the screen in the green".
I used to have a guy at one of the local major chain tire shops that raced dirt track stuff, he understood the whole factory alignment on a 40+ year old car thing and would do custom alignments and wasn't worried about my aftermarket suspension parts. But he left, and that was it for all of the major name tire and alignment shops near me as far as getting a custom alignment. So now you have to find an independent shop with an alignment rack, AND an "old guy" that knows a little about old torsion bar mopars. Realistically, most of those "old guys" are now long retired, alignment shops are not somewhere you usually find 60+ year old guys. I'm not saying they aren't out there, but going out and finding somebody like that isn't easy. And custom alignments at independent shops can get expensive real fast. You basically have to find a race shop around here, and they're aren't a ton of them with new alignment racks.
Maybe where you're at there are independent shops all over the place with experienced employees, but around here it's pretty much all big name national chains. And there's a lot of them, so, there aren't really any independent shops. 10 years ago you could talk guys into doing custom stuff at places like that, but I can tell you I haven't had any luck with that in the last few years. Which is why I bought my own alignment gear.
As far as the Skosh and getting more than +1.5° to +2° caster, it depends on your components. Yeah, with all stock stuff that's about the limit. But even with just offset UCA bushings you can get up around +3° caster. If you have tubular UCA's like it sounds like the OP does, it depends on the brand and style but usually you can get up to at least +4° and sometimes +5°. If you have adjustable UCA's like I do, you can almost get whatever you want. On my initial install I had to start dialing my caster back from +8° from where I had the generic setting on the adjusters. I run at +6.5° caster. So it's completely dependent on what parts you have.
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You are correct, and my guy is getting ready to retire. I told him to get an alignment rack for his garage. I admire you guys who have decided to get the tools and do your own alignments. I was assuming a good stock front end, so that is were those caster numbers came from. My guy has me so spoiled, I can ride in any car and can feel if the alignment is right or just within spec. My point was, it is not a thing to cheap out on and definitely worth finding a good shop.
Oh totally, I agree. I wish I could find a good shop that would do a custom alignment on my car. They are around, but it's kind of a specialized deal and driving an hour to an alignment shop poses its own problems, I have to rough in an alignment before I even do that and if I'm going to do that I might as well just do it myself.
And my car is kind of specialized at this point, I have a harder time than some others will finding a shop. Not even all of the "old guys" want to deal with my car either, every single suspension part is aftermarket and adjustable, it runs modern wheels and tires and takes a modern alignment. Not an extreme one by today's performance car standards, but VERY extreme compared to anything factory for its era. Used to be I could tell some of the alignment techs to just put a 2010 Challenger SRT into the computer and not worry about getting to +9° of caster. But between the custom alignment and all the aftermarket parts it just made more sense for me to get my own stuff. Plus I have a few cars, so really it all paid for itself pretty quickly.
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