BIG BRAKES alignmant

[Blaze86Vic]

+.23° , The 1/16th thing is an old school general rule of thumb. If they suggest going with a more positive number, I'd go with it.

[jayh]

as blaze stated, you cannot see caster, but his discription is actually sai- steering axis inclination.

caster is the allignment of the upper and lower ball joints

your problem seems to stem from not enough postive caster, but Id have to see the printout

I would run as much positive caster as you can, 4.5 would be great, but Im not sure you can get that much out of it. use a half degree split in caster to compensate for road crown. so if you can get 4.5 + caster on the passenger side, run 4.0 + on the drivers side. I would run a slight amount of toe in, roughly 1/16" per side. camber- I would have to look at the specs, but I would think closer to 1.0 negative on each side

more postive caster gives you more stability and better steering wheel return. it is not a tire wearing angle

[82LTDQS]

Thanks, Nice picture Jayh.

[Blaze86Vic]

If you have the big brake conversion, you definitely can get that much caster. I have my caster as far as evenly possible with the camber I have now. When I had 1.5° of camber I had just over 7 degrees of caster. With the big brake kit, you get twice the adjustment. The 98-02 upper control arm has caster and camber adjustments on the upper tie rod, and you still have the OEM slotted control arm mounts on the frame.

[pollock]

Here's my suggestion:

Start with a new shop that you have not previously talked to. Don't tell them about the big brake swap or any other mods. Just tell them up front that you want them to check/adjust camber and caster and you're willing to pay for it.

Unless they've worked on a box recently (not all that likely) they may not even notice the difference.

[gadget73]

Interestingly enough, you now have the exact same adjustments a 92-94 car has. I don't understand why its such a problem to get one of these aligned, its not like you did something that the factory didn't do.

[82LTDQS]

Ok cool

[jayh]

I beleive what blaze is calling an "upper tie rod" is a cam essentric

if you can get 4.5 degrees caster, thats awesome, use 1/2degree split to compensate for road crown like I explained

[Blaze86Vic]

Sorry, upper ball joint.....not sure why I typed tie rod, my bad.

But yes the upper ball joint is mounted to the upper control arm with eccentric adjustments, that when used in conjunction with the box body slotted upper control arm mount adjustment allows you to reach new levels of caster and camber far beyond stock of either model year. As Gadget has mentioned, it is quite disconcerting that shops have problems adjusting the camber and caster on these cars, either 92-02, or 79-91 both have factory adjustments for this, and the big brake upgrade simply includes both factory adjustment points without modifying either one from stock.

On my car I evenly max the caster out at what ever camber I am trying to get. I do not do the caster split that Jayh mentioned for road crown. The caster split he mentioned is something you should do though. My focus is track, and event driving, not on crowned roads, this is why my setup does not have the split that he is referring to. It didn't come factory with 4+ degrees of caster and they drove fine, so there is no required need to get max caster. However, to give you an idea of what your limits of adjustment are, below are the two setups I have ran that give you an idea what your maximum available caster adjustment is as some camber level (as these two are partially tied together in the adjustment.)

At -1.5° camber, max even split caster was just under 7.2°.
At -2.3° camber, max even split caster was 4.5°.
Each car will vary some, but you would be perfectly safe asking for -1° to -1.5° camber and between 3° to 4° of caster with the 1/2° caster split.

[Lincolnmania]

took me a long time to find a decent alignment shop, but now i have two places that both do excellent alignments........i had my town car aligned in 2004 to stock specs.....it's still good!

[82LTDQS]

Makes sense. will do