Good progress today. Received my top bows back from the powder coater this week.
Today I adjusted the rear ride heigth and aligned the front end. I took 1/2 inch out of the rear heigth and now have a 5 inch chassis heigth in the front and 5-1/4 inches in the rear. Looks better in my opinion and pretty well gets rid of the dead cat space. I think ERAChas will approve.
I used a camber/caster gage that I've had for years and used to align some of my other old cars. It's not much to look at but works well and gives repetitive results over and over as long as precautions are taken to level the car, take care to align the wheels straight for camber and use precise 20 deg turn in and turn outs for caster, and take care to hold the gage perfectly vertical when taking gage readings. When I bought my new Ford Lightning back in 2003 I immediately suspected the suspension might have been a little askew because of how it hunted and darted around on anything by smooth roads. I checked it with my gage and got some readings that definately didn't look right so I took it back to the dealer to check. Sure enough it was out of spec and they had to install the service camber washers and re-align it to spec.
It took awhile to move the car around in the garage and find a sweet spot where I could get the chassis level. I checked the front crossmember and the crossmember behind the seats and checked the floor to frame dimensions to get the car level. I left my dollies on the car as their adjustments helped in leveling and they made turning the front wheels in and out during caster checks easy.
I used a right angle to mark an equal distance off of the frame rail and then used a 4 ft straight edge to get the front wheel parallel to the car/frame before checking camber.
I used an adjustable protractor tool to mark 20 deg hashmarks on the floor for the caster checks.
I taped a level to the gage in order to keep it vertical for each reading.
After caster/camber were dialed in I used a toe tram to check toe in. It took a little fiddling with because the
oil pan interfers with it on the backside of the tires. I finally laid it on it's side with the leg and dial arm pointing straight up and resting on the rear sidewalls.
The camber was a little out of spec on the negative side starting out but it had plenty of caster. After using the guidance in the manual to figure out how many shims to add or subtract I set up again and re-ran the checks. I ended up with 1/8 deg positve camber on both sides and 4-11/16 deg caster on both sides. Pretty amazing it came out exactly the same on both sides. The information in the manual on how much change to expect from shim adjustments was right on. Toe in is set at 1/16 inch
Tomorrow I hope to get the rear bulkhead vinyl done while the weather is warm and install the resister on the ignition warning light to see if I can get the voltage regulator to start regulating.
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