How to do an Alignment at Home

awesome stuff, thanks Jason

 

nice how-to Jason!

 

Great thread

 

Jason for President. Well done.

 

This. Great job.

 

Interesting method to get the caster, never knew how to do it!

Very nice.

FWIW I believe that when you have the wheels turned a direction they won't be turned to the same degree, this is the ackerman effect or whatever the hell. ... just for reference.

 

Haha fair enough! Well done though.

 

Haha anal. Not straight, haha.

 

Awesome.

One point to add - for second gen guys with VSC - if the steering wheel ends up in a non-centered position, the VSC will be more likely to activate when turning left or right. If it's sufficiently off - it'll throw a code and deactivate ABS and VSC.

 

Bravo OP!

You wanted some constructive criticism, so here it is...... Actually, I don't have any only just a few observations after doing my own DIY home alignments for about five years, including four on my Taco and adding/refining stuff along the way to improve accuracy.

Make sure the vehicle is level front-to-back and side-to-side; a carpenters level and the floor tile for shims will work on many floors. Great idea of yours for shims. Make sure tire pressures are correct. These are important because if your truck is sitting on an angle, it will introduce errors in the angle gauge in both camber readings and the calculated caster readings. My concrete garage floor looks level but has about a 3 3/4" slope from the front wheels to the back wheels.

I found that it was necessary on my Taco to lock the brakes while doing the caster sweep because sometimes tire walk would occur and will give inconsistent readings. A 2x4 or something else wedged between the seat (protect the seat) and brake pedal works good.

If you really want to get fancy, you you can introduce a simple string box around the truck and do thrust angle alignments as well. I use cheap-o polyester dayglo orange thread from Wal-Mart, jack stands, and steel rulers graduated to 1/128 in. to measure from the string to the centers and edges of the rims. Doing this you can get a truck that tracks straight as an arrow, correct for thrust angles and get a straight steering wheel.

Not my intent to thread jack here but say don't be afraid to do a DIY alignment. The first one takes the longest and it gets easier each time.

 

http://www.circletrack.com/techarticles/ctrp_0709_chassis_alignment/viewall.html

You talking about something like this?

We had to lay out right triangles in my HD PM class but I don't recall exactly how to do it. Something roughly like one of those pictures.

 

Yup. Nice write up in the Circle Track article.

For my first string-box alignment I stole a write up from an Elantra forum that has great pictures and is easy to follow.

But I heartily agree with the OP's comments above about the simplicity factor. The idea is not to scare anyone away from trying it, and IMHO his write up does a good job at this.

For me, I simply got tired of getting burned by incompetent alignment shops and vehicles that pulled hard one way or another despite being "within specs." If you do a Google search you will find that many are similarly tired of being burned and have resorted to DIY techniques.

I reached the point of anger one day after going to three different shops, same day, and getting totally different numbers at each shop. Car still pulled hard right.

So I called Hunter Engineering and had a nice lengthy conversation with one of the engineers to ask why I was getting poor alignments despite wiz-bang lasers and computers from expensive machines.

The answers amazed me. These things must be calibrated regularly and that costs substantial money for shops to have the factory techs come out. So many skip it. Also, if a head is dropped, or handled roughly, forget assuming the machine is in calibration. Is their rack level? Don't even assume so.

 

bjmoose is correct in post no. 32 above.

The FSM says you must do a Zero Point Calibration for the VSC/ABS whenever you do anything at all to the suspension, steering, and following alignments. The steering wheel has to be centered to do this, and the truck has to be level. Of course the stealership is more than willing to do this for you.......for a substantial fee.

But it is easy to do yourself. I'm too lazy to look for a thread on this now, if there is one, but have it worked out on my '09 that has all the electronic nannies.

 

Ha. I love it. The paper clip is the expensive SST referred to! Good job.

 

Caster is a PITA to measure accurately. Camber and toe are relatively easy.