How to do an alignment on a car at home using only a tape-measure!!! (And Alignment Basics)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so all right guys welcome back to daring motors uh today we are going over alignment basics and also how to do a front end alignment using just this tape measure right here uh is it to check it and if we're going to adjust it we're going to use these two wrenches right here and that's all we're going to need to adjust our toe on our car all right now before we get into the alignment i will be having a special announcement coming out next week um in next week's video so stay tuned for next week's video because i'll have a very special announcement coming but before we get to the alignment down below the car let's get inside and get the steering wheel straight all right so before we do our alignment uh we need to make sure that our steering wheel is straight so we'll get this straightened out and so that way while we're adjusting everything when we finish up the steering wheel we'll be going straight that way we won't be able to keep the steering like this just to go straight on the road now if you want to make sure your steering wheel is straight the whole time you're adjusting what you can do is you can take your seat belt pull it as far as it far out as you can get it just like this and then you're going to go feed it through the bottom here once it feeds it through the bottom you're going to pull it through pull it around you're gonna pull it around and then you're just gonna click it right here in your seat belt just like that and that way while you're making adjustments your steering will stay still just like that all right now before we get into the alignment uh we're just going to take a look at the tires the way they are and basically there are three things to your alignment there's something called caster which tells you how much your wheel if it goes if you draw a line straight up and down tells you how much your wheel goes like this or like this and then the second thing that you'd adjust is camber and the way camber is is your tires able to be in like this which would be negative camber or out like this which would be positive camber um and then the last thing we're going to talk about is toe and toes what we're going to be doing today with just this tape measuring wrenches so if you look in uh the best way to describe toe is to look at your feet so if you have your feet here this would be toe in if you're looking from the back your car and this would be toe out if you're looking from the back of your car so right now our tires look pretty straight but we got to take some measurements first but normally you want your car to be a little bit toe-in and i'll go over that in a little bit all right so the way i'm going to check the alignment of only using this tape measure here and i'm going to pick a spot here on the tire so i can pick this tread pattern right here this tripod in here or this one here but it just has to be the exact same on the other tire on the other side of the car so i'm going to pick this one here in the middle i'm just going to lock my tape measure on it just like that all right so i'm just going to get this tape measure on the tire here i'm gonna go all the way across the other side okay so now we're on the other side of the car what we're gonna do is we're gonna hold this tape measure tight we're gonna come in right here i'm going to zoom in as best i can for you we're going to be right here and we're looking at the same exact tread that we chose on the other side all right so we look really closely right here you can see the tire charge is about 63 inches and there's a little click yep sixty two and one eight sixty three engine 63 and one eighth inch we have on the front end here and also something you want to make sure you do is when you're measuring this try and keep your tape measure level so you're at the same exact spot on the tire all right so now i'm at the back of the tire and i'm going to want to do the same exact thing so i'm going to want to pick a spot right here on the tire and go across to the other side this time i'm going to kind of feed this across to the other side just to make it a little easier on myself all right so i have the tape meter pulled across here and if you look really closely we can see that we're about 62 and three fourths maybe one above that um so right now we currently have some toe out which which we don't want so we're going to adjust that so that way we can have some toeing on this car all right so what we're doing our alignment we're going to want to come underneath the car so we'll come down so under the car and we're going to come over and look over where the wheel is so if you look in here we have a bunch of suspension stuff but the thing you're going to want to look for is this right here which is your tire rod end so it looks kind of like this most cars and trucks and you're going to look for this nut right here so we're going to do is we're going to loosen up this and that's kind of jam nut so that this can't move once we loosen that up we can adjust our alignment on our toe all right so what i'm going to do is i'm going to get my two wrenches here one's going to go on this nut right here which i'll get set up first so that is on there then i'm going to get my other wrench i'm going to hold the tire rod still it's going to sit right here on the timeline where the little squares are and now i'm just going to use all the force i can oh there all right so i got this loose so i got this right here you got it loose all right so you can see this nut right here is going this loosen that up a little bit by hand let's get it separated from this tire up just like that grip onto this part right here and we're going to turn this so it goes into the tie rod the reason we're going to go in is because we had toe out so what we want to screw this in it's going to make this shorter and pull the front of the tire in towards the car all right so i may have lied about just using those two inches because we will need this as well to get onto this and spin it so we're going to go in to the to the tie rod just like this and i'm just going to rotate it about a full turn there's half and there's one full turn just like that and now i'm not going to tighten this up all the way but i'm going to get this nut kind of back close to the tie rod end just like this and kind of keep it there and then i'm going to do the same exact thing on the other side of the car all right now that we got both sides uh just a little bit we're going to go back and check our alignment again just to see the kind of adjustments we made but before we do that i'm just going to turn the car on and turn this wheel back and forth a couple times just move forward and backwards a couple times just kind of let everything settle in so the adjustments will show up all right now i'm going to do the same thing measure from the same exact spots that i did before all right so on the front i got um 62 and right between 3 4 and 7 8. 13 16 there we go quick math right there so i got 362 and 13 16s on the front so i'm going to do the back side and then we'll compare all right so now we're to the back and we're looking right here and it's almost exactly 63. actually i'd say it is exactly 63 inches so we have a difference of 3 16 of an inch so now we're going to go and compare what that means to our degrees all right so i have this char right here that shows what the difference between inches and degrees are so right here i had three sixteenths of an inch on my toes so i had point four six degrees of toe but i'm supposed to have point one degrees of tube which is way in here so i'm gonna have to go back under dial in a little bit more and push it out so i can get in between that range so i'll get to that now all right so if you look right here this is nice and tight right there uh it's sitting about 30 63 and 3 16 of an inch right there and you can see it's right here on this little dot right there's where it's sitting now let's go check uh the back of the tire and see what we have all right so now we're on this side so we're looking right here we're sitting at 63 and 1 8 right there now which is perfect so we have 1 16 of a difference from back to real so i have 1 16 of a toe in or maybe a little bit more but because i have that um we have 0.1 degrees of toe all right so right here we're at 1 16 of toast we're maybe a little bit less so we're right below this 0.16 degrees of uh toe so that way we are in our alignment specs because this is plus or minus point zero six so we made it just in there all right all right now the last thing we're gonna wanna do uh before we put anything down is we're gonna wanna tighten these lock nuts back up because if we don't tighten these down if we don't tighten these down it could be a long day when our tie rod falls off when we can't steer so we're going to get the wrench on there put this wrench on there we're just going to tighten them the best we can by hand just like that tight as i can go and i'm on the other side i'm just going to tighten this up just like that all right that's not loose that's not loose at all it's nice and tight now we are all done with doing our front end toe alignment all right guys and that car is right there all lined up and perfect ready to drive and all we did with was these few tools and just a tape measure no special alignment tools were needed for doing this so if you guys have any questions on this or comments on how i did this alignment go ahead and leave in the comment section below but if you enjoyed the video please leave a like and subscribe and make sure to stay tuned for next week because we got a big announcement coming all right thanks guys [Music] you

Channel: Daring Motors

Views: 1,226,344

Rating: 4.7695842 out of 5

Keywords: cars, alignment, suspension, easy, how to, DIY, basic, tools, engines, tires, trucks, diy alignment, wheel alignment, toe in, front end alignment, tire alignment, string alignment, toe out, front end, do it yourself (hobby), home alignment, how to align a car, how to perform an alignment, tape measure, toe plates, best alignment, self wheel alignment, tie rod, diy wheel alignment, do it yourself, tire alignment at home, alignments explained, alignment car, alignment at home

Id: Wab8IcOQvQw

Length: 11min 7sec (667 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020