Now i'm sure many of you are going to be skeptical and some may say its the wrong way to do an alignment. Anyway, I believe in what works and what is tried and tested. I took my car to Michael and Co in San Jose (25 years in the business) per the recommendation of Rob at Zcargarage.
Doug the technician, said he could "pull" the front to bring the car within factory specs for the alignment. He is using special tools to slowly alter the angle of the factory control arm. He did say that Idealy a camber kit is better to use because you have more adjustability + and - camber. However, in my particular case I do not plan on raising my car or dialing in additional negative camber to autocross. The cost is not cheap. The 4 wheel alignment takes about 3-4 hours @95 per hour. Doug stated that it would NOT alter the integrity of the factory a-arm, if it did they would recommend the camber kit...

so here are the before and after numbers:
BEFORE:
Front: L R
Camber -1.2 -1.4
Caster 8.5 8.6
Toe -.10 -.24
Total toe -.33
steer ahead .07


REAR: L R
camber -1.1 -1.4
toe -.05 -.10
total toe -.15
thrust angle .02

As you can see the toe is really bad and the camber is out of spec for a sedan.


Here the numbers after the alignment:
AFTER:
Front L R
Camber -.4 -.4
caster 8.4 8.5
toe .06 .02
total toe .07
steer ahead .02

REAR: L R
camber -.9 -.9
toe .13 .18
total toe .30
thrust angle -.03

It ended up taking them 2.5 hours. So 230 bucks later my car is perfectly aligned.

I am very happy that I was able to get the car aligned without any aftermarket components. Talk to Rich for details if you are interested in doing the same. 408-286-2989


cheers
-Sukhi

 

what kind of suspension parts are on your car, that you needed to have aligned?

 

its lowered with pro-kits

 

I believe that. The reason being is that there is a location here in Miami that guarantees to pull the front into spec w/o a-arms. They can get the front and rear to factory. So I figuered there were other places that did the same.

 

hmm.. I thought our a-arms are not adjustible. Did they use a shim or something to get it into spec?

Anyways, very cool you got your fronts in spec.

 

When did you install the springs and how long did you wait before
you got the alignment?

here's some picky points to point out since they took 2.5 hours and
took a large chunk of money from you.

AFTER:
Front L R
Camber -.4 -.4
caster 8.4 8.5
toe .06 .02 <= they should've been able to do 0.04, 0.04
total toe .07 <= should be 0.08?
steer ahead .02 <= not 0.00?



REAR: L R
camber -.9 -.9
toe .13 .18 <= they should've been able to do .15, .15
total toe .30 <= should be 0.31
thrust angle -.03 <= should've been able to do 0.00 or -0.01 at most.

 

Kenchan,
its all relative. I lowered my car 1 year ago. I had it aligned by wheel works 6 months later after seeing some initial bad tire wear. The tires wore out extremely faster after the alignment. Took it to these guys and the initial readings were way off, I will not go to wheel works again. The car is lowered with eibach pro-kits.

The car is now aligned within specs. Now take into consideration that I did not have to purchase any aftermarket components or rear spc toe bolts. You will see that I paid about 100 more than your typical 4 wheel alignment. I'm sure you can calculate the cost of a-arms, rear toe bolts, labor to install, and alignment. Even if I installed the pieces myself, total cost would have been well over 500 minimum, to get the same end result.

 

I believe they just modified the factory parts by bending them.

 

but there is still fundamental areas where they missed... how can you
say that they did excellent work when your toe-in is not even and
got thrust angle? I guess the ONLY thing you care about is camber.


You should get your money's worth especially since you sound like
you're on a tight budget.

 

i guess the thing that really threw me off was your
title... that you got it down "perfect."

It's not.

 

Kenchan,

You are very quick to assume. Your assumptions are incorrect.

You missed the point of the post. There is an alternative to purchasing aftermarket components to align a lowered car. This was for others who may find it useful. I wonder how many cars with aftermarket components have a "perfect" alignment and at what cost? Budjet is not always the deciding factor. I have read of a few who have camber kits and are still out of spec. Like I said before, its all relative.

 

Now that wouldn't be good.


Sukhi: Can you comment on how they were able to align the numbers within facotry specs without any aftermarket hardware?

 

Please explain why? There are alignment shops here in Dallas that do the same thing. For cars without aftermarket alignment kits, that's the only way and it works out great.

 

I'm sure it works and I'm just speaking from initial impressions without any real knowledge of how it works. But my assumption is that bending parts may compromise structural integrity of said parts. That's where my comment stemmed from. But like I said, it's all an assumption. Until someone can tell me what is exactly done then it's just an initial comment so take it with a grain of salt.

 

You just have measurements within spec tolerance,
but it's still sloppy at the price you paid. Do you even know what
those measurements mean and what the unit of measurements are?

I am not assuming anything, you're the one assuming that your
current measurement is 'perfect' when in reality, it's not.

but the bottom line is that you seem satisified and that's great.
i would be uneasy if I had your measurements on my car though...
that toe is pretty bad imho.