the summary: was alignment questions 80Q

[Tessie McMillan]

Thanks guys for all your help and support!!!! You gave me good advice and 
the vocabulary to use in dealing with the sports tuner/alignment shop 
working with my (had-an-accident) 80Q. I have a good alignment now. Not 
exciting, not aggressive, but very solid. Read on:

Based on feedback from you, I took the car back when I was unhappy with 
the first alignment, armed with some of my previous alignment reports from 
the same shop, showing what the car had been capable of. You'll recall 
they couldn't eke out negative camber, they gave me what felt like 
positive toe, and the caster was different by .9 from L to R. This time 
they had me work with a guy who was an expert in dealing with wrecked 
cars &:-). He measured the frame for me, and found it to be true. He 
reported I had a huge dent in my leading piece of sub-frame, but he 
didn't think it was structurally unsound. The difference in caster 
ultimately proved to be due not to a bend in the frame (yay!!!) but to 
the fact that I had the right side suspension totally replaced. All 
factory pieces, but being newer, apparently there was about a mm more in 
length here and there. He loosened the sub-frame on the left and was able 
to stretch out the fit so that the caster measurement matches that on the 
right. He was then able to dial in a whopping -2.0 degrees of negative 
camber on the front, for both sides.

I don't have the sheet in front of me, but it seems to me the new caster 
is still pretty high, like 1.7 or 1.8. (It was 2.0 on the R before the 
sub-frame adjustments.) And while the car doesn't corner as aggressively 
as I'm used to, it is extremely stable and unwinds easily out of a turn.

What I'm going to do is keep the setup where I have it now, and see how it 
behaves at the track this year, since it's essentially a different car 
than it was before the accident. I might find that with the coilovers, I 
don't need to have quite so much negative camber. I noticed improvement in 
my tire wear after I first put the coilovers on, but I didn't have enough 
time to drive it before the accident to come up with a good history. If I 
don't like it, I can ask them to change it.

BTW, all the labor and additional alignment work they did on the second 
day, they didn't charge me for &:-). 

Take care,

Tess
in Bellevue, WA USA