DIY Wheel Alignment

You are here because your car has a mind of its own driving down a road.  You want to go left and your car goes right.  We’ve all been there, and this is how we fixed it.

Alignment of the car can get expensive at times.  It is a time consuming process, but it can be safely done anywhere in a relatively flat area. You will need to make or buy some special tools.  On most cars all you can do is toe, but on some you can do camber too, and on others you can fine tune anyway you like.  In this DIY installment, all we can do is toe and camber.

The most crucial alignment is toe, with the toe out of whack, the tires can be chowed through in no time.  So its crucial to be able to adjust that one.  Toe can be changed by accident while adjusting camber.  We are going to do camber first followed by toe.  You will need to find out your car specs from repair manual. For us it’s -1° camber and 1/3° total toe.

Image origin

Image origin

Before getting the car tuned, we need to get or make the necessary tools.  First, lets make camber gauge.  Camber gauge is nothing fancier than a protractor, so remember your junior high geometry. Get a nice aluminum large ruler, cut two sections off with a hack saw around 5″, another one the length of your rim, in our case its 16″ for 15″ wheel.  Now attach the two small sections to the big 16″ section. On the top leg, make a hole and attach a piece of rope, the thinner the better.  Make it just long enough to pass the bottom leg, find a nice heavy nut, and attach that on the bottom.  Using a level, find a nice straight wall, place the new pendulum/protractor onto that flat wall, and mark the zero on the bottom leg (where string hangs off, in our case its at 470mm).   Measure the length from the pivoting point on top leg to the scale, in our gauge its at 380mm. To measure, place the gauge vertically such that string floats extremely close the bottom leg.  Read off the gauge, the point where string is on the bottom leg, in our case 463mm or -7mm.

Camber gauge, see the string, see the numbers.

Now comes geometry,
\(\sin^{-1} \frac{string\,on\, bottom\, leg}{length\, from\, pivoting\, point\, on\, top\, leg\,to\,scale}\)

\(\sin^{-1}\frac{-7}{380}=-1.06^\circ\).

If you don’t have a calculator with sin capability, don’t be sad, here is a cheat,
\(\frac{-7}{380}\times \frac{180}{3.14159}=-1.06^\circ\)

Since we dealing with such a small angle, what ever we taking inverse sin of is actually the angle but in radians, so 180/3.14159 converts radians to degrees.  See, it’s simple.

Next we had to make platforms where we could move the wheel and rotate them without moving the car.  This step save a lot of time, otherwise, you will need to move the car back and forth to reset the alignment.  Go to the hardware store and get four nice medium non-textured tiles.

Tiles and grease.

In an auto parts store, get some wheel bearing grease. Any grease will work as long as its viscous.  You will be making a sandwich of tiles and grease in between (shiny side on the inside).  Apply plenty of wheel bearing grease, don’t be shy.

See grease and tiles duking it out.

Once you are done, get the car to a somewhat leveled place.  Stick the tile grease sandwich under the front tires.  So as to not drive onto them, lift the car up with a jack (be safe, don’t be stupid), and place the sandwich under the tires, then gently lower the car.  Most likely they will break under the weight of the car, but that’s okay, they will still work.  Once under both tires, and handbrake up, you should be able to rotate the steering wheel with ease.

See the sandwich under the tire

Now, you’re ready to do camber.  You will need your body weight in the driver seat.  Camber will change drastically if the car unloaded.  Make sure to have around 1/2 to full tank of gas.  In our case, to adjust camber on our Audi, we need to loosen the lower ball joint nuts and then the can be moved left and right to adjust the camber. Before you do any adjustment, measure the current setting, who knows, they might be what you looking for.  With loaded car we got -0.75° on left and -0.6° on the right; unloaded car we got -0.9° left and -0.6° right. Our goal is -1° (car specs) so lets start adjusting. We loosened the left ball joint, and it jumped out to maximum camber of -1.21°, a bit too much for us.  Using jack and some random stuff on the left and plank of wood on the right so car would not skid sideways, we pushed the bottom of the wheel inward.  While using the camber gauge, we managed to get the camber to what we needed.  After that we tightened the ball joint.  Onto the right side, while loosing the ball joint, a small impact with the ratchet moved the ball joint accidentally to the proper position, how awesome is that! But for you, you may just have to repeat what you did on the right side. So now we got the proper camber on the left and right front wheels.

See measurements, do calculations

Check that the floor is leveled.  If not, camber will be off.

Camber adjustment in our case

Pushing the wheel to proper camber, ball joint is loose.

Holding the other end so car won’t slide off the tiles.

Next we do the most important and difficult task, adjusting the toe.  With the toe rods loosened and lubricated with penetrating fluid, we are ready to adjust.  This method is simple and easy to do, so we did it this way. Using fishing line, we tightened one end at the rear of the rear left tire.  Next we stretch the line around the car and tightened the end at the beginning.  Now we have a line going around the car and its about at the center of the wheel.  Now, we used some nuts to move the line slightly away from the wheel, just enough so the line would dangle free.  We used one nut with some tape at the front of rear tires, and two nuts in the front of the front tire.  Now we have a very good reference point to measure toe from. This is THE easiest method, other methods just make you want to blow your mind out.

Center the steering wheel with a level. Toe time.

1. Rod end 2. Lock nuts 3. Adjuster

Adjusting, 1/8 of revolution is too much, it’s really sensitive.

String stretched around all 4 wheels at center.

Required spacers.

Taking a measurement, using the 64th side of the scale.

By default, the line from back to front sets the angle of about 0.2° the extra nut give us -0.14°, so the line is actually 0.06° and we need 0.17°. So we need to measure 0.11° between our line and wheel. Our rim is 16.25″ wide at point of measurement, so that means the front and the rear of the wheel need to get 2/64″ difference, same math as for camber.  In our case, left wheel had 5/64″ and right wheel 9/64″, very off.  We adjusted the toe rod, until we got 2/64” difference.

Once done and all adjusters tightened, we opted for a nice test drive. On an empty-ish parking lot, we marked the edge of the tire with white shoe polish, and did some hard cornering, at the near maximum of tire handling.  What we looking for is equal tire contact path on both sides.  And we got it!. So many hours later, we are done.  If you don’t want to waste your whole day on this, you have to go to a shop, with their electronic gizmos, so they can do all the math fast and easy.

Checking the wear pattern, easy and important check.