club.liberty.asn.au

Can someone please help me decipher this wheel alignment I got yesterday?
Car: '05 Outback 3.0 158K k's.
I'd just installed new KYB front struts (retained standard springs), ball joints & Whiteline Anti Lift (front) LCA rear bushings. Torqued it all up & drove straight to the local JAX for an alignment. 'Ol mate who was doing the job seemed pretty switched on, but hadn't seen the adjustable castor Whiteline kit before. I'd gone prepared with Whiteline's instruction sheet which has a no-brainer diagram depicting the range of adjustability etc & stressed I was after MAX castor. Now, I just kinda wacked it all together during installation, getting the castor adjustment close enuf to max but not really bothering as it was gonna be fine tuned anyway. I'm not going to pretend to understand the finer points of suspension tuning & barely understand the proper functions of toe-in, castor, camber etc, but to me, looking at the report, I had more castor when I drove in than when I drove out!
I just presume I'm not interpreting it correctly as I don't got none clue bout this stuff.
Steering felt VERY light driving to the alignment, making me think the castor kit made a massive difference (maybe just heaps of camber or something?) but driving home, the steering felt normal with the Whiteline mod hardly noticeable to be honest. Slight improvement on turn-in, not as good as I thought it'd be.
Can someone please tell me if this alignment is a good result or not? I told em I wanted it to be bang on.
Cheers.
(Sorry if it's hard to read)

What I can see with the rear suspension one wheel is pointing slightly out (toe out by 1.1mm) and the other side is pointing in by roughly the same amount so the total toe on the rear is almost zero (this is good) as one side cancels the other.
The fact that one is in, the the other is out means the car is slightly steering to one side at the rear (thrust) but after adjustment it is absolutely spot on, zero and center.
The left rear wheel is tilted slightly in at the top (neg camber) by about 0.3 degrees and the right is tilted slightly out at the top (pos camber) by about 0.2 degrees. The change to after is so small it's most likely the car just settling after the toe adjustment was made.

The front looks like some castor has been taken out, and the spread (difference between sides) is larger. Sometimes this is done to allow for the crown in the road so the car drives straight.
The front wheels went from slight pos camber to slight neg camber (good) and the rather large issue with the toe (right wheel was straight ahead but the left pointing in by 5mm) was corrected and both sides are near zero giving a total of near zero which is ideal for a AWD car. This is what helped changing the feel on turn in, if you want more responsive turn in set the front at toe out but say goodbye to your tyres.

All in all it should drive pretty well. This is a decent alignment in my books as it is far more than a "toe and go" that you find at most while you wait type operations.

Increasing caster would make your steering feel heavier and wanting to centre itself. The light feeling would have been from the camber or toe setting you messed up undoing the suspension. Even though it appears you have less caster in actual fact you may have to max amount taking into account the rest of your suspension geometry. There is no one setting as you are aligning the system not individual components. Yes, you can physically add more caster but at the expense of something else. It's the same with ride height, camber, toe, etc. Adjust one and you need to balance them all.

This is the problem with cheap coilovers and why they are illegal in many cases. People think "sweet, I can dump my car easily". You can but you compromise the rest of your suspension, steering, and braking unless you modify things like caster, roll centre, camber etc to correct the geometry. There is only so far the standard components/adjustments will go and it's usually not extreme. Here in Japan you can buy extended lower arms to run huge amounts of -camber on the rear the problem is no one make bits to to modify the rest of your suspension so it works properly. Following these cars round a bumpy corner is a huge laugh as they have very little contact patch, almost no shock stroke, and next to nothing in terms of suspension travel. Things are super jittery and the cars skip all over the place which is why they very rarely go over 40km/h. Kind of defeats the purpose but it's all just about looks.

Wheel alignment is an art as much as a science and someone who is good at it and knows when to bend the rules is worth their weight in titanium. Gold doesn't belong on cars.

Exactly the kind of replies I was hoping for. Damn this forum has a wealth of knowledge amongst its members!
Thanks heaps for taking the time to give those very detailed responses -much appreciated.

Adrian2627 wrote:Wheel alignment is an art as much as a science and someone who is good at it and knows when to bend the rules is worth their weight in titanium. Gold doesn't belong on cars.

Gold is a great heat reflector.......very useful on cars

You have a decent alignment now, the pre alignment setting not good.

enjoy

Adrian2627 wrote:Wheel alignment is an art as much as a science and someone who is good at it and knows when to bend the rules is worth their weight in titanium.

Agreed 100%

It's a good alignment, the key point being ZERO TOE
But i'd still like to see a little more camber on the front end if it were my car,
I corner pretty hard around town and give the outer edges a workout, so i can run a lot of camber and have very even tyre wear

jslayz wrote:

Adrian2627 wrote:Wheel alignment is an art as much as a science and someone who is good at it and knows when to bend the rules is worth their weight in titanium. Gold doesn't belong on cars.

Gold is a great heat reflector.......very useful on cars

You have a decent alignment now, the pre alignment setting not good.

enjoy

Good point Jay I forgot about the McLaren F1. I was more referring to some of the tacky gold crap people put on their cars.