Oh what a difference an alignment makes!

[Shawn C Meze <skerocdriver@juno.com>]

Ive been doing my own rag tag alignments for a while now. It's works fine
for the most part but ive never had the finite dialing capabilities using
the old dual measuring tape method.

I met a guy (Mechanic) who works at a local shell service station who is
just itching to be a part of racing. (Even if its just doing an alignment
on a mild autox car.) He offered to do me a custom alignment so I took
him up on it after I got my returned warrantee Koni's back on the car. So
off to the shop went.

Ive always used -1.5 camber on the front on my car which has a long
history of understeer. I decided that its time to use all the negative
camber I can get so I dialed the bolts to where I had the most and
tightened them down. I'll be damned if I didn't get -2.66 on the LF and
-2.68 camber on the RF when we did the first reading on the rack! Pretty
good for an old A1 I thought. Previously I had problems getting more
negative camber out of the RF. The max was -1.80.

Then we trimmed 1/4" length to get a little more adjustment on the toe
settings and 1/16" toe out was set.

Its rare to find a shop that will allow a custom alignment with you
sitting in the car so I consider myself lucky.

The aftermath street driving testing showed that I now have, for the
first time in this car, oversteer! WEE! I'll have to adjust how I drive
the car since I now wont need to use the old rally "faint" motion going
into corners to get the rear to slide a little which always only lasted
for a very short time before the rear was hooked again which caused the
car to push thru the corner. It looks like I can now set the car up for
better rear traction where in the past I was using overpressure in the
rear tires (215/50R13 BFG R1's with 36psi rear) and the koni's at full
firm to help the car rotate in the corners.

Bottom line, you cant have too much negative camber! Cant wait for May
2nd to test the theories.


              Shawn Meze
86' Jetta GLi           82' Scirocco GTi
The Fastest, Quickest, Cleanest and
best looking Scirocco in all of San Diego!
http://www.Geocities.com/MotorCity/Speedway/1308/index.htm

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