I was looking for a slightly more aggressive alignment for my daily driver. Car has GC coilovers 340f/380r with OEM wheels and S02s. Tire pressure was 34 psi. Alignment was done with a little more than 1/2 tank of gas, spare tire and tool kit were installed in car and I sat in car for alignment. Car is lowered about .75" front and 1.25" rear.

Front camber -.7 and -.7
Front castor 6.0 and 6.1
Front Toe 0.0 and 0.0

Rear Camber -1.9 and -2.0
Rear Toe .24 and .25

Thrust angle -0.01

I did not notice that the thrust angle until after the alignment. Is it a small enough value to not worry about? Thanks.

 

Anyone know if the 1 hundreth of 1 percent thrust angle is too much?

 

That is pretty close to the UK alignment and what I have. I really like it. The car feels a lot more planted in fast corners.

I have bit more camber in the front 1 degree vs .7 and 2.00 in the rear

I am running more caster 6.3 and 6.4 and was thinking about lowering the value since with the addition of a heavy front roll bar, the steering is a bit heavier, maybe even try 5.5

A wee bit less toe on the rear (same thrust angle) what is that anyway?

With aggressive street driving and 2 track days, I am getting pretty even tire wear.

The only other change I made lately was to raise the rear right height, (less of a drop than the front) to make the car steer quicker

George

 

Your thrust angle is fine. Thrust angle is a measure of how straight the body of the car is when it is rolling straight forward. If the thrust angle was 90 degrees, then the car would be rolling exactly sideways.

 

George,
Thrust angle is the overall angle at which you car is oriented when moving striaght ahead. So my car is 1/100 of 1 degree off (- = left I think). You may have seen cars or tracks with 10 to 15 degree thrust angle, the car looks like it wants to turn sideways when it is going straight I am not to worried about the .01 on my car since it is so small but I wish it was 0.00. It can be changed but fine tuning toe settings, I had 0.00 thrust angle before the alignment which was why I was disappointed to end up with 0.01. Anyway, my steering feels very light with Caster set at 6.0. In terms of overall ride height, my rear end is higher than my front end which is silimar to the OEM setup. I was pretty happy with the way it handled before, I added the coilovers to reduce body roll and lower center of gravity as well as stiffen things up just a bit. It seems to be working. An X-brace also noticable helped, the STB did not do anything other than look cool and it weighs next to nothing.

 

Actually, I didn't explain that well. It is a measure of the direction of force from the drive wheels relative to the center line of the car. If one rear wheel has different toe than the other, the net force from the 2 wheels will not be pointed toward the front center of the car. A car with excessive thrust angle will look like it is driving a bit sideways (dog tracking) when you follow it down a straight road.

 

Thanks for the description on thrust angle....

For what it's worth .001 sounds like such a small value that if you just bounced the car up and down a bit it would change a little anyway.

The guys at the Alignment shop I went to, said that on any street car with rubber bushings it's hard to get super precise measurements since the bushings have a bit of play in them.

George

 

After thinking about it for w ile I came to the same conclusion. I also wonder what the the measurement error is for the alignment machine?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by gfacter
[B]Thanks for the description on thrust angle....

For what it's worth .001 sounds like such a small value that if you just bounced the car up and down a bit it would change a little anyway.

The guys at the Alignment shop I went to, said that on any street car with rubber bushings it's hard to get super precise measurements since the bushings have a bit of play in them.