Hello.I hope everyone is having a good day! I want to learn how to do alignments at home. I already have an idea of how I may want to go about doing this in my garage. Any tips and tricks for the c5 specifically?
Also, for the auto cross and track guys. Are y’all messing with Caster any? How much camber? Toe in some or out some? Or 0 degrees Toe.
I want to make the car more responsive for autocross and the occasional track day, but do well on the road.

 

My suggestion is to better understand how alignment angles will affect driving characteristics. You will like something different than I do. But also remember that static alignment specs are only part of the recipe. For example caster effects sai and that is really important in the corners. Also camber at rest is different than when the suspension is loaded in a corner. But the basic theory would go something like this

street driving where you have tire wear as the goal and no real adverse loads on the suspension you are shooting for a flat contact patch with enough caster th self center and enough toe to keep the car stable.

track alignment will be set up to have the biggest contact patch while in the corner and the straight line specs will just be what they are. This alignment will not care about tire wear and will be focused on maintaining all the contact in the corner while the suspension is loaded.

if you want the best of both worlds pay a alignment shop to set the car to factory specs and leave it alone. Tires are expensive and trying to get it good enough in the garage floor without precision measuring equipment will lead to lots of worn out tires that died early. Yes there are many that claim they can do it with a tape measure but those cars don’t get good tire wear and I wouldn’t want to be behind the wheel at speed with the car darting all over the road like a leaf in the wind. Machines like a modern hunter alignment rack measure down the the hundredth of a degree so that you can get that alignment dialed in to maximize whatever you are going for and that is just not possible with home brew tools.

 

From my perspective, factory recommended alignment specifications are a good place to start.

An experience of mine is that factory camber specifications will cause the inside of all four tires to wear more, especially the front tires -- but give very good grip in turns.

Toe in, camber and caster can be measured in your garage. Camber with a good carpenters level that has a vertical bubble. But you have to do basic calculations. Toe in can be measured by stetting up string lines using four jack stands, two per front wheel. Again, some basic calculations are required.

Caster is more complicated. I have not adjusted caster on my C5, but did on my '55 Mercury after installing power steering. If you are determined to reset C5 caster, that would be another post.

Following are a couple of diagrams that I AM SURE WILL confuse.

 

When you start doing your own alignment, it is easy to get obsessed with all the different systems, I started with simple strings systems in the 70-80's to the CSM Performance Precision Hub stands. The latter, by far is the best system out there without going to the professional laser alignment systems. I current run my C5 on the street, autocross, and track with one setting and even tire wear. The front uses 0 TOE, 2.25 negative camber and 7.0 caster, In the rear I have 3/8" total TOE-in and 1.2 degrees negative camber (all I can get running BS in autocross. It is expensive but repeatable system.

 

I adjust my own toe w/strings. You can get it surprisingly accurate.

 

Moving this to C5 Tech.

 

Alignments are far more complex than you realize especially when you are talking about a performance setup.

Toe is not only a major contributor to tire wear but it is also what makes a car feel stable and planted while moving. positive toe can also reduce the effect of negative camber tire wear. Positive toe is preferable in almost all situations for stability and. A car that is set at 0 toe will have negative toe when moving and especially while braking and that will cause the car to feel like it wants to dart around and not stop straight. 0 toe is never the best option the only conceivable benefit could be less rolling resistance but even if that made a difference it would be so negligible that it is not worth considering.

Camber also is dynamic in the fact that it is really there for when you are cornering. You set enough camber to compensate for tire deflection and suspension squat under load. For the most part camber is of no effect unless in a corner (excluding extreme camber for stance and cosmetic purposes). The easiest way to check if you have the right camber settings is to chalk your tires and test it out.

Caster is by far the most dynamic angle in your setup and it has effect on all of your suspension geometry. When people think of caster they usually only think of self steer or self center when considering where to set this angle but that is far from reality. Caster will drastically effect toe gain and caster gain as well as scrub radius all of which have huge effect on how your car feels and drives.


You can not get an accurate alignment with string as you need to pull it tight to measure its length and string stretches. You can not make precise measurements with an inaccurate measurement technique.

this is the surface level of alignments and it gets way deeper when you dig in. You may be able to get your alignment close to what you want in your garage but it will be no more than that just close. And beyond actually measuring properly you need to understand what these angles do and what effect they make.