At-home alignment setup

[spxxx]

I thought I would share my technique for aligning my car on the fly. I haven't paid for an alignment in two years and I've gone through 3 sets of Coilovers, installed a few different pairs of control/toe/camber arms on the car and my tire wear is normal and the car handles great on the track. Best of all, I don't have to pay a shop $200+ for a "race" alignment and I can change settings between sessions at the track to dial things in.

I use a magnetic electronic level from Home depot, a steel square tube and some bolts for a camber gauge + a steel plate, tape measure and sharpie for my toe measurements. (Camber gauge: $55 and toe plates: $20ish)

I will take the average of 2-3 readings for my toe calcs and my camber changes every track day so that varies. This car is 85% track so this might not apply to folks who set it and forget it for the street.

[houtan]

Can you please elaborate on how you are measuring the toe?

[spxxx]

Originally Posted by houtan

Can you please elaborate on how you are measuring the toe?

[bbnks2]

Originally Posted by spxxx

Sorry, but adjusting toe is not this simple. All this does is tell you total toe... You have no way of knowing which side to adjust other than eyeballing if the wheel are pointing straight which is impossible. This setup needs to be much more robust to correctly set toe while maintaining 0 steering angle.

[spxxx]

Originally Posted by bbnks2

Sorry, but adjusting toe is not this simple. All this does is tell you total toe... You have no way of knowing which side to adjust other than eyeballing if the wheel are pointing straight which is impossible. This setup needs to be much more robust to correctly set the steer ahead angle.

This assumes you care that your steering wheel is perfectly aligned. But yes there is also the issue of side to side toe adjustments.

This is good enough for me as I rarely drive the car on the street and I swap suspension parts every couple weeks

[bionicbelly]

I do this as well. If you are making small adjustments, you will never see it in the steering wheel. Even if you only adjust one side.

If it does get off, set up some strings, and you can do a 4 wheel alignment. takes some time, but pretty accurate, and precise.

[1and1]

I come from a Mazda background, transitioning from a Speed6 to my 135. During my ten years with the really fun MS6 I spoke quite a bit with a track hound calling himself CanyonRider who track prepped a normal 6 for both autox and road course work.

He has a massive long thread on Mazda6Club.com on the topic which is totally worth a read just for the entertainment value of watching someone assemble a race-ish car.

On topic here tho is the really easy set of alignment tools he made. Base kit is the post linked, but then it expands as he makes needed mods for more rear camber etc in other posts further down. Hell, the whole thread really does make a great read, just remember that the 6 is a double wishbone setup.

http://forum.mazda6club.com/dyno-tra...ml#post3398322