11/17/18 Rear Alignment
We did the alignment on the rear wheels today. It turned out to be a fairly lengthy job primarily because of having to pull off the struts several times to expand the bottom hole and get enough play to get the camber correct. We ended up with ~1.7deg of camber on both wheels and ~0.25deg of toe in. The alignment procedure from DF was a great help and we improvised a bit because of not having all of the components they had. The camber was done with an electronic angle finder just like the DF writeup. The toe in was done slightly differently described below.
We started with blocking the front tires and jacking the rear up enough to get the tires off. We did all of the alignment with the brake rotors bolted tight. Originally I bought 4 of the laser levels thinking that I could use the magnets to clamp them to the rotor and make the adjustments easy. As it turns out, the magnets were not there and the variation between laser levels was significant - i.e. up to a 3/8" difference at 4-6 feet away. So we ended up using a single laser level to do all of the measurements.
First, we hung a plumb string from each side of the frame at the same location and then put a tape measure down on the floor:
After eyeballing the alignment to get the tires straight ahead, we used the laser level against each rotor and aligned it up on the 2 tape measures and made sure both were the same. This gave us both wheels pointing ahead with the same toe in compared to the frame:
Then we measured the distance between the 2 sides and that gave us the front separation ~5' in front of the rotors:
Next we turned the lasers around and measured the distance between the rear (~3' behind the rotor) measurements:
Then the difference between the two tells the angle of toe in. For our particular arrangement where the front and back measurements were almost exactly 8' apart, a difference of 7/8" gave us almost right at 0.25deg of toe in. Essentially the same as the 1/8" difference mentioned in the DF alignment write up.
We have had the car up on jack stands for months now and finally getting it on the ground, it looks smaller and much faster! (and is easier to climb in and out of!)
Next we align the front, bleed the brakes and test drive is on the near horizon!