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Alignment Commentary and Specifications - November 7, 2007

By: Steve Liebenow

In order to maximize your alignment moneys, and not require paying for it and tires multiple times, make sure of the following: wheel bearing tightness and health(!), steering rack play, tie rod end play, and upper A-arm Unibal joints and lower a-arm frame bushings, and lastly ball joint health. Same is true out back. Nylon bushings in hub carriers, plus upper and lower A-arm Unibal joints. and the 4-link trailing arm Unibal joints all need to be checked for excessive movement.

Reason being, if you neglect any of the above, it could lead to needing to paying for the alignment all over again..... If you change shocks and springs, get ready to revisit the shop as I found out!

Turns out the net effect of "lowering" the Goose front end is suspension "Toe-out". Now, how you lower the front of the car is important and may be unintended! Factory shocks were not adjustable for height or valving. Front or rear. DeCarbon(sp?) was the manufacturer of the original shocks I have seen, and Koni ponied up to the market right away and supplied an aftermarket replacement. Sadly, although a better valved shock, they used the same poor rubber end bushings as in the factory shocks. Those bushings tended to lose their shape in as little as a year. Rubber was way soft and old factory bushing inventories sitting today on dealers shelves are not getting better. Modern rubber bushings would need to be fab'd and inserted if anyone wanted to stick with the Koni shocks.

If you put in adjustable springs/shocks as I did, I soon found the inner edges of my tires wearing...

I "thought" I had my ride height set up properly, but I soon found out otherwise. It sure looked good! I then proceeded to pile in luggage, tools, and the wife, and drive off to Vegas and back! Didn't handle badly, but the shocks are valved wrong still and would occasionally bottom on a big bump! (New adjustable valving shocks will fix this!) What I did notice was increased wear on the inside edges of the fairly new tires.

So, when I took my car back to the tech that had originally done my car, after noticing the tire wear, (he was now working at a different shop, with wild state of the art equipment!), I found out what was wrong with the car. When he was all done, it basically came down to this; if we just raised the front of the car about 3/4", my alignment came right back into spec. I drove the car home and put a couple of rounds each on the spring perches, and it is tracking true enough for the moment. Upon further conversation, I found out that I had some work to do before he needed to be involved again.... put in the new shocks that will be around for a while!

He also found that the steering rack is off center and I will need to correct this before getting the car realigned as well. (Steering wheel turns more rev's in one direction than the other, from the center point. About a half turn or so off.

I REALLY don't want to pay for this job twice! So, ALL of my suspension has been gone through, and I have new front shocks ready to go in. The trick, is to set the car up for how it is going to be "loaded" most of it's time on the road. The tech loaded the car with weights to simulate driver, fuel, baggage, and a passenger since that is the large portion of my driving condition.

What will happen after he sets the car up and I'm not fully loaded down? Well, since lowering the car caused a toe-out condition, raising the car a tad, by running lighter, should cause a greater toe-in condition and only after being loaded down for a trip, and hitting a large lump in the road will the car tend to go towards a neutral or toe-out condition. Blasting 10 miles down the road to work or an occasional road trip shouldn't be much on the car.

This will be something that the driver will need to discuss with the alignment shop, how do I set it....? Passenger, no passenger. Baggage, never baggage! Average?

If you set ride height to be such that the lower a-arms are parallel to the ground at rest while loaded (or slightly higher in the center), you are going to be in good shape. This is pretty much the same thing for Panteras. You can also set the chassis to be higher in the rear ever so much, so that at speed, wind force will settle it.

Cross weighing and adjusting the springs/shocks for weight balancing can also help with better braking too. With the non-adjustable Koni shocks in my car, I would get locking up of one front wheel upon heavy braking. No longer present with the adjustable shocks and springs, even though they are not my final shock choice yet. The scales immediately point out if you have a condition where the loading of the car is heavier on one cross balance point (front left to right rear or front right to left rear) which puts more weight on two diagonally opposite wheels and can allow the "lighter" wheels to lock up upon braking. Cross weighing and adjusting for it allows you to get a balanced load on each wheel resulting in better performance of the chassis.

Now, enuf said, here are some spec's:

>From a source that cannot authenticate where they came from.....but they are old specs...and have a great drawing!

FRONT

Camber -.75 Degree

Caster 5 degrees plus

Toe in 0 ***I don't thing this is a good value to use based upon what I have learned about the front end suspension!

Ground clearance 6"

REAR

Camber -.75 degree

Toe in 1/8"

Ground clearance 6 -11/16"