Took the car to get the suspension set up properly today. Took it to A line in Dudley used them a few years ago to set up my A4 after I changed the suspension .
http://www.alineyourcar.co.uk/
They have a Hunter set up and thats pretty much all they do so they are good with it.
They have loads of race and track cars there along with a lot of pretty expensive fast cars.
They asked me what I wanted it set upto so told them front parallel toe, 3.5 degree camber, rear 24 minutes total toe, around 1.5 degree camber .
I also got them to check and give me the print outs for the chassis dimensions wheelbase and track so if I do some checks in the future with the string and tapes I might be able to do it a bit more accurately.
Here's the car on the lift in the workshop.
These are the dimensions recorded for the track and wheelbase. They were the same pre and post
The actual offsets recorded by the machine, Quite surprised there is only 1mm difference front to rear after removing and replacing almost everything suspension related on the car.
Pre alignment
Post alignment
And the pre and post setup sheet that you usually see. He said I had done quite a good job to get it as close to what I wanted and it wasn't a million miles off except the rear NSR camber which it seems I set well wrong. Think I ended up setting it at 2.5 degrees camber and not 1.5. But that was what I went there for.
He loaded all the values I asked for into a specific set up which has been saved on the machine. So if I go back there again and tell him the set up name they could load it in a few seconds.
When I checked it with strings I came to the conclusion rear to was 23 minutes toe in on NSR and 6 minutes OSR. with a total of 29 minutes total to in.
It was actually 19 and 9 for a total of 28 minutes toe. The amounts of movement are really small . 4 minutes of toe is around 0.5mm across the width of an 18 inch rim so you are never going to get it bang on and I bet if I drove the car off the ramps and round the block to measure it again things would have changed by a few minutes.
I actually got to give it a bit of a drive since disconnecting the front ARB and I am liking it. The car hardly rolls at all due to the spring stiffness. TBH I can hardly detect any more roll than when it was connected.
Despite the small changes on the setup it did seem to track noticeably straighter and by the time I got back home I had a big smile on my face. Compared to how it handled when I bought it the difference is more than night and day.
Just need to get some decent rubber on it, with the quite worn 225/40/18 infinity tyres the alloys came with I am sliding around on the seat hanging on around roundabouts so the bucket seats will come in handy when it's running 255/35 18 NS2R tyres.
Front caster is up on standard values with the use of the camber plates and the TT bottom ball joint along with the camber plates have front camber around 3.5 degrees each side.