That really sucks. Steering is the most challenging system on a car to get absolutely right, and (I'm sorry to say it) but 90% of the shops out there are little more than "R&R" (remove and replace, or "drop and swap") style shops.
The second you start changing suspension components, you REALLY need to have the car in the hands of a qualified suspension specialist- Someone who understands all the inter-connected trigonometry, and the engineering involved. Someone who can can look the car over, and do the entire job in their head, before they ever take a wrench to your car.
Regarding the tie rods being maxed out- When you say "maxed out" does that mean that all the threads are exposed? or does it mean that the outer tie rod can't screw
in anymore because it's bottomed out?
The Classic Roadsters assembly manual specifies that you are
supposed to cut 7/8 inch of thread off of both inner tie rods. Is it possible that one of your inners is cut correctly, and the other one isn't? This would create a big difference in the exposed thread counts from side to side.
Also- I'm not sure if this would still even be necessary with your new control arms, because I don't know if the length, or the pivot point of the new control arms has changed, which would thereby change the entire sweep angle of the suspension, therefore requiring all new calculations for the corresponding tie rod lengths and sweep angles.
Lots of math to do when you start re-engineering the front end of a car.
Even if you get the basic alignment measurements into spec, you have to be sure that the tie rod sweep angles are correctly matched to the control arm sweep angles, or else bump steer will result...
Rob- Great writeup on the string alignment technique... Very old-school.
Most of the time I have to go over to the HAMB (and suffer through all of the associated verbal abuse, hahah) to get high quality feedback from the old-school hot rodders...
