DIY ALIGNMENT IN YOUR GARAGE

[Music] what's up guys welcome to Blake's garage so today we're gonna be doing a little bit of adjustment to the bird e30 over here if you guys have not subscribed to my channel I recommend to subscribe but this is gonna be a general video for basically any car truck van whatever what I'm gonna do real quick and this may not apply to you this part is I'm gonna lower in my car now this is something you have to do after lowering your car basically after changing your tires changing any sort of suspension part or anything like that that is doing an alignment so I'm gonna show you basically two easy tools that you can use you can use one that's basically free you probably have this stuff sitting around your house I'll show you that first one and that would be you need two of these jack stands which if you work on cars you should have a jack and jack stands hopefully and everybody's got a set of these and then the other thing you're gonna need is a bit of yarn a bit of string twine whatever and that is the first tool you can actually do an alignment with just these two things right here that you can pretty much do for free and then I'll show you kind of the a little bit fancier method of aligning your car with this new stuff that I got right here and that's this little box that I got in the mail yesterday from a hard motorsport if you can see in this video is not sponsored or anything like that but this is just a cool tool and I like their logo and you'll see this is a German car it really does not matter what type of these things you use you can use these any car truck anything like that when you buy performance stuff you know you got to get some cool stickers so this is what we got right here we got the tow plates so this is depth II hard motorsport logo kind of itched in here pretty cool and we got two tape measures of the seam type we also have a marker and two pieces you can actually use to attach these to the wheels so I'm gonna go ahead and lower the car and then I'll show you guys how to use this and to adjust this with both these tools this you can pick up for around I think 60 bucks I'll probably put an amazon link down below this is a hard motorsport one I'll put a link down to that below stringing yarn or twine or whatever I don't think you need a link to that should have it around your house you can actually buy this kit if you already have to take measures you can just buy these plates and do your alignment like that sell the car sitting right now I just upgraded the coilovers I add CA tunes regular street coil overs and basically redid the whole suspension if you guys look back on my other videos I'm reading the whole front suspension I switched it to a quicker rack the bump steer relocation correction and it basically quickens up whole steering when I did that I also upgraded to the CA tuned competition coil over and sudden tour I thought they would be these have firmer spring rates actually set it to the same height that just the car did not settle as much I'm gonna lower the front and rear bin will get it down to the alignment so I have my suspension dialed into the appropriate height that I won't have about a shoe fitment right there I can just barely stuff my shoe in there that's where I'm sticking this car this is an autocross slash track car so I do want it a little bit high and I definitely want it functional I don't want it super super slim I mean most people would say this is pretty slam but bring you stance guys you would say this is like monster truck and I guess you can see we got a bit of camber in there which means the wheel is turned like this inward that is negative camber if it was straight that would be zero degrees camber and if it was like this it would be a positive camber and you don't really want positive camber you want just a little bit of negative camber and if you're doing some racing and high-performance driving definitely a bit of negative camber is good this should be about three degrees negative camber so cool so we got that set we got the caster set let me show you now how to use just some string and get this thing pretty dang dialed in just gonna set my jack stands right here you're gonna need some jack stands some put those in front of the car basically and this is what you're going to use to make a straight line to the rear wheels with the string so it is taking the piece of string what you can do is just tie a little knot in the end very easily just loop that around half of the jacks game and the new skin start Penna wrapping this around the car now what you want it to do is line up with the center line of your wheel so basically the center cap of your wheel it's going to run this all the way around the back then you're going to want to take it on to the jack stand tie another little loop or a knot when we do that we're just going to be able to tie this around here we can go ahead and pull the jacks and tight so we just want this string to basically be nice and tight same here we're just gonna pull it right now I gotta go adjust it in the back so it's over the wheel center line of the wheel great it's running right through the center line of the wheel just this one down a bit running straight to the center line of the wheel now what you want it to do here is just barely touch the outside of the wheel you don't want you don't want any of this going on if you look down you just want it to just barely touch and then you're gonna want to take it to the tire and just have it barely touch on the tire you're gonna be able to look at the front of the wheel and the rear of the wheel and be able to tell if it needs to go toe out more or toe in toe in is when your wheels are like this think of this as the front of your wheels zero Degree toe this is just straight forward and toe out would be like this so on this car I want it to be about zero degrees toe that is aggressive because when you start to get on your suspension load you're gonna get a little bit of positive toe however that is going to give you a little bit of quicker turn in on say racecar autocross cars something like that a little bit of toe in is going to give your car more straight-line stability so you can look up the stock manufacturers recommendations and try to dial into that there are also trapezoidal calculators that you can figure out like how much you need you know in to lien on the front or toe out and figure that out with the exact measurements so for example this wheel here is pretty much touching in the back and in the front here data has a bit more of a gap which is telling me that this wheel has a bit more toe in than the other wheel if I go over here and I look actually they're about the same so now all I got to do is adjust the tie rod I have hemispherical tie rod ends on this car just for race car stuff so they have no play but all we're gonna do is adjust that and make this wheel get pushed out a little bit and that is going to correct our towing issue on this cart and then I will have the alignment dial so I'm gonna go ahead and make those Corrections right now once I get those things dialed in I'll kind of just show you guys that the car is all dialed in I have zero tow then we'll put the tow plates on because it was a really good accurate measurement as you can see my steering wheel is centered sorry guys it's kind of dark just got dark out here so real quickly I am look Elise etting up this plate just like this I'm gonna take the strap now your toe plates may have something different on them you're gonna want to check the caster and the camber first and dial that in right now all I'm doing is just doing this for a baseline just because I want to see how well I did with the string alignment so you want to make sure that that's nice and level up against the wheel and that you have basically the camber dialing bead one through to the other side of the car and then we'll bring the other one around to the front as well now what we're gonna do is this lock the tape measures into the side right here make sure they're both in the same position now we grab the tape measures all the slack out okay so now that we have our tape measures set up you're just basically going to make sure the plates are flat and then take the reading looks like I'm at 66 and a quarter on this side about 66 and a quarter so pretty much I'm set at zero toe which is exactly what I wanted you want to have those numbers even if you're going for zero toe if you have this number a little bit less in the front that's gonna be a bit of toe-in if you have this number more in the front and less in the rear that's too loud all you're gonna have to do is adjust your tie rod ends accordingly if you needed to go in or out depending on what kind of alignment setting you're trying to get zero is easy if you want like a quarter in that's fine too that'll help you can attract straighter and also what's cool about this kit is it came with a dry erase marker so literally you can just write your measurements right here on each side each side of the tool board and you can wipe them off at a later time and that way you can remember what you're trying to dial yourself into alright guys so the birdie 30 is pretty much all finished up as you can see over here we got that string it's looking real nice and straight so that's great and yeah we'll talk to you guys soon later reach out [Music]

Channel: Blake's Garage

Views: 218,501

Keywords: how to align a car, how to align a truck, string alignment, garage alignment, DIY Alignment, at home steering alignment, quick alignment, DIY string alignment, toe in, toe out, toe, toe plates, alignment plates, wheel tracking

Id: TLNja_9Rxdk

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 08 2017