Front End Alignment in your driveway Done right

can you give your vehicle alignment at home in your driveway just as good as a shop sometimes better yes let me show you how without all the common mistakes I see this right here is referred to the string method where you stretch string all the way around your vehicle give yourself a nice square box and then you're able to measure off of that and tell if your front tires are towed in towed out and same along with your rear but there's a lot of common mistakes I see people to do and we're going to go over that I'm going to go to the small-scale model and show you what I'm talking about so here we got our small-scale model a pickup truck and what we're doing is testing toe in and toe in is when both front tires toe-in or toe-out and then you can do the same thing with the rear on front-wheel drive cars you know this is a rear-wheel drive car with a solid rear axle but front-wheel drive cars will have an independent rear suspension and well some rear-wheel drive one is equal to and they can also have toe-in or toe-out which is good and bad but we'll go over that first thing you want to do is make sure your front suspension components are not completely worn out and generally why you're doing alignment is because you've replaced something and now something's askew but what we're doing is pulling our vehicle in straight you want to make sure it's going straight into its parking spot on the levels ground as possible and setting it there and then we're setting up for posts around it - in the back - in the front the first misconception is people believing so people believing that their front wheel track and there are the front wheel track and the rear wheel track are they identical which a lot of times they aren't even though the vehicle manufacturer may make this you know 63 inches up here and 63 inches back here if you ever put different calipers on the front or rear and the mint and the aftermarket manufacturers made of 1/32 thinner thicker or something else that'll change the width of your front in your rear axle so the first misconception with this method is that you can just take your strings I'm all the way around the vehicle and measure off the center of this wheel and the center of this wheel and then measure off the center and then you know take up three inches here three inches here and they need to set these at three inches and three inches away from the Centers of all your wheels is that your square because you're not if your front one is actually narrower you'll actually get you know this is over exaggerated but you don't have a square box you have a box like this and so you automatically have toe-in or something else to that effect so when you measure if you put your wheel straight on with these strings you're actually towed way in which isn't good so the first thing you want to do is set your box up so it protrudes behind your vehicle and in front of your vehicle and this method works even if you have a vehicle with different sized tires on the rear than the front so what we're going to do is set this up loosely around the vehicle these bolts don't want to stay that gate and they can protrude you can have it SIGG's AG this way a little bit that's not important you can have this bolt order and more than that when that's not important but what we're going to do is once we get amateur frontage we're is we're going to measure the distance from here to here from this string to this string and we'll just say it's five and a half inches and up here we're going to shim this to be exactly the same five and a half inches so now these two lines are perfectly parallel with each other and then we're going to shim them to the vehicle so we're going to start on the back and you're going to say this is a you know 3/4 of an inch away and this one's only 1/2 so we're going to shift everything over but now it messed up our lines so we're actually going to shift the front over as well and measure off the center of the front axles and you know say this one's only a quarter inch and this one's 3/8 and we'll just keep playing but you'll have to do it quite a few times because when you move this in it actually moves the back in a fraction of them out but you just keep doing it does it take actually that long and until you get perfectly square this is this is five-and-a-half inches here this is five-and-a-half inches there that's one of your most crucial measurements and in your vehicle axle centered in there that what that's this way and the front ones this way and you'll probably find out that the distance between here and here you know let's say it's a whatever you it's not that important what you set this up and say you have three inches here and three inches here you might actually have three and an eight here and three an eight here and that's just fine as long as the measure up here is five and a half inches and five and half inches or whatever the inches matter doesn't really matter you're just making sure you have a perfectly square vehicle in vehicles perfectly square in there and so that helps out when your tires are way wider on the front because you just measure center to center but now we have a perfectly straight line all the way down all the way down so we're going to measure the distance from here to here inside of our wheel let's go out to the real vehicle and find that out so everything is in line perfectly line it lined up beautifully with the car but now I'll show you why even with this vehicle that specs is having the exact same track width the front-wheel space is exactly the same as the rear wheel space even those specs as being identical it's not this is what the back is it is about an eight this to the front actually about an eight inch maybe 3/16 narrower than the rear no expect exactly the same so now what we're going to do is you just measure from a good spot on the rim the steering wheels as straight as possible when I pulled in but we might have tweaked a little bit I pulled in on some grocery sacks just doubled over on itself a whole bunch of time make sure this concrete was clean right underneath you can see how easy a garbage bag allows me to move this and what I'm going to do is a flat spot on the rim not the tire don't measure off the tire because I mean there's lumps and everything on it you know you got letters and flat spots and on flat spots and it could bulge right there you don't know we're measuring on the rim we're doing every measurement off the rim in the exact same spot and what we're going to do is we're going to line up one tire and get one tire as square as possible and I'm two and a half roughly right there and two and a half right there so I got this tire squared and if it's not I can shimmy it with my hand a little bit don't worry too much about the steering wheel yet but what I like to use is actually just a caliper just a cheap caliber works that lets me get really close and I can dive it in against the rim and bring the other bring the piece up and I can see I'm not actually looking at the gauge I don't need to look at the gauge but then I can see with the rope with the strain where I'm at and I got this tire dead dead on square with the string so the other side we can actually adjust it's on the other side which is the same distance in the centre away from the string because everything's square we can measure and touch the string right there and so close that string this gives me a great measurement of where it is and so it actually is out just a little bit which is the toe out so both the tires this is the front of the car pointed out a little bit and that's what you want you want toe out to perfectly straight on a front-wheel drive car because it's pulling and you can have them out and as it pulls it can bring in just a little bit the rubber itself on the tyre a rear-wheel drive car what you want is you want some toe in of about a sixteenth of an inch to an eighth of an inch because the front end is just pushed by the back end and that will help it track and help the steering wheel go straight down the road so now from here what I can do is I can actually adjust the tie rod I've already adjust it but it's back here I can reach up I can reach up underneath adjust the tie rod a rod right here it's how you adjust it and this is what your string wheel moves back and forth right here and there's just a big nut right here so you'll just put your wrench on and loosen your just loosen this big nut and then the center shaft the - you're steering your Rach opinion we'll actually you'll just rotate that with another wrench so you'll just rotate that around and that will extend this pushing the tire out or contract it pulling the tire in and you just play around with it till you get to the measurement you need but when you adjust the tire rod it might actually push the tire on the other side so what you'll do is you go over and you'll realign up the tire on the other side square it up and get everything exactly where it needs to be the rear of the car exactly the same but now once you've done all this what do you do when you're driving down the road and your steering wheel sits at an angle when you're going straight not to worry all we do is loosen both tie rods one on this side one on that side and we'll just rotate one up the other one down the exact same amount quarter of a turn or whatever to keep track and that'll shift the front do it again shift it again until you get it to where your steering wheel struck straight down the road or if it doesn't bother you just just leave it but most people don't bother them and that will mess up your alignment once you already have it set just remember you want the center line of the string to be in the center of the wheel or as close as possible there we go that tackles the most crucial thing to alignment the thing that will make your wheels pull one way when you're driving down the freeway make your tires wear out in no time at all that's toe in toe out there are other cup a couple other things too alignment there's a camber and there's caster casters not so easy to adjust some vehicles aren't even adjustable some are some aren't camber also most vehicles you can adjust camber some you can't but that's the amount of that the tires actually lean in or out like the old Volkswagen bugs you saw driving down the freeway back in the 80s there were people had lifted up the backs they got a ton of camber and now the new Japanese vehicles when they lower them down the ground the rims are just sticking out like that catching rainwater in the rim that's a lot of camber as well and that's adjustable and that's pretty easy I mean you can see it you know but you pretty much just put a metal bar on the rim right there and then stick level to it you've got these these digital levels these days I'm sure smartphones could even do it these days now you just see how much what angle you make sure vehicles on level servers you can see what angle it is and you can adjust it usually there's a bolt you screw in and out and it pulls the top of the tyre Interpol's it pushes it out and just make sure it's within specs specs aren't the easiest thing to find you'll find that out that's why you just kind of go off a rule of thumb when you're doing this in your driveway and that is you know what will drive vehicles you want roughly dead-on or maybe a little toe out about a sixteenth toe out the rear end of the front-wheel drive vehicle have a little bit of toe Ian zero to six to 16th toe in rear-wheel drive vehicles will have on the front end they'll have about sixteen maybe an eighth of an inch toe in on the front and the rear usually is just dead on usually two solid rear axle some that are having dependent rear you can adjust a little bit but most of them just they stay dead on thanks for watching hopefully this helps you out questions down below thumbs up go to Facebook see you guys soon bye now slight variation will save you a little bit of time is the two by four method and here I manually measure between this string and this string the front and the back but then if I moved one thing everything kind of got out something will save you a little bit of time it's take two identical two by fours and line them up perfectly with each other draw a straight line across both and put nails in the exact same spot here and the exact same spot down here and then you'll put a two-by-four the front of the vehicle I wanted the rear with the string wrapped around it and that keeps the distance this distance identical and so when you're centering it if you move the string one way or the other it moves both the same strings of the exact same time where if I moved one on this one then I have to come over move the other one the same and there's a little bit more yes with the way I should get it right here the 2x4 method is a little it is a little easier so you can do the two-by-four method as well but keep in mind that it sticks out and there's a greater chance of actually tripping over it and knock your whole measurement off and so usually I don't do the two-by-four method just for that but it does make it a lot easier

Channel: sixtyfiveford

Views: 362,922

Keywords: alignment, ford, general motors, chrysler, jeep, 4x4, lexus, toyota, nissan, mazda, wheel, tire, tire wear, suspension, drag link, tie rod end, kia, volkswagen, subaru, ball joints

Id: Dl0pCDpZYwQ

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 04 2016