Home/Track Alignment Setup
 

Today I enhanced my home alignment setup, and thought I'd share.

My new setup consists of wood boxes with leveling feet. I level each of the boxes individually in both directions, then level them all to each other with a self leveling laser projector. Then I put in some homemade slip plates. The slip plates consist of two pieces of stainless steel with grease between them. They work quite well.

For the string setup I use two pieces of conduit made to be of identical length. On each end, I made a groove with a pipe cutter. Just enough for the string to snap into, so the strings always remain parallel to each other. In the past I've setup the two rods on jack stands, but they're not too steady. When I make adjustments on the car, the car would move slightly. Then I'd have to re-center the string setup. IT sucked and took forever. I figured I'd take some time today and try to improve it.
http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l5...mentSetup2.jpg

So what I did is made the rods attach to the car. Here are some pics showing what I did.

For the front rod, I found that there were two unused fog light bolts inside the air dam. I used some M6 bolts and welded on some pieces of 3/16" rod. Put one on each side, and then welded a stop to keep the alignment rod from hitting the car. Then I welded some drilled out couplings to the alignment rod. The whole setup just slides over the two rods attached to the car. The whole thing ends up with absolutely zero slop, and perfectly locates the rod.
http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l5...mentSetup4.jpg

Here it is mostly slid off the posts.
http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l5...mentSetup8.jpg



For the rear setup I decided to go off of my trailer hitch setup since its nice and sturdy and about in the right location. I made some brackets to attach it over the hitch, and use a bolt and wing nut to hold it on tight.
http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l5...mentSetup5.jpg

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l5...mentSetup6.jpg

http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l5...mentSetup1.jpg


Now when I make adjustments on the car, it doesn't matter if it moves since the alignment rods move with it. It made the process about 10x faster than previously. Setup is significantly faster as well. Still need to paint it, but pretty much done.

Looks nice, but I can't help but notice you have a towbar on your FD..

You've got to get your tires to the track somehow. :D

Its all aluminum so its super light though.

Really really nice setup. I have a similar setup that came with my ex-World Challenge car, but I have never bothered to do this for my FC. I like the fact that it is so portable and flexible. Gives me some good ideas.

I am also in envy of neat and tidy your garage is. Mine looks like about 3 Transformers exploded in there. I just have way too much stuff trying to support 2 racecars out of a 2 car garage.

Eric