First order of business is to check the condition of the balljoints & tierod ends... make sure the wheel bearings aren't sloppy and that the tires and rims match (set the pressures too). A bent beam or one with worn control arm bushings would also present a problem. Assuming all is well, check the camber and adjust it if needed. You'll need the car parked on a LEVEL surface to do this....it's also assumed that the REAR suspension has no problems that might be inducing a tilt to the front of the car - measure the distance from ground to rear torsion housing and from ground to bottom of the front beam on both sides. Camber should be 30' (½°) positive - top of tire further out than bottom - plus or minus 20' (1/3°) and the maximum deviation betwen one side and the other should be kept below 30'. This is the hardest thing to do under the shadetree, you can use a $10 magnetic protractor (but it's hard to see anything smaller than ~½° with one of those) or a carpenter's square and bubble-level with some trigonometric calculations. Note that the notch in the camber eccentric should always be pointed forward plus or minus 90° - if you point it aft the caster will bew outside of design margins.
Once the camber is in spec you can set the toe-in. Spec is 30' ± 20', or you can measure with a tape...distance between the front of the tires should be 1/16" to 7/32" less than the distance between them at the rear. This is a little tricky to do because you can't take a direct reading halfway up the tire (the body/pan get in the way, and the reading must be made with the car on the ground) but if you go for ~1/16" as high up as you CAN measure it should be good. To eliminate any error caused by tire/rim runout, first jack up the front an spin each wheel while scribing a mark down the center of the tread with chalk, pencil, or a Sharpie and take your measurements off of that line. Caster isn't adjustable (other than as a side-effect of setting the camber) without shimming the beam (typically at the bottom) away from the frame head...but the spec, in case you decide to let Canadian Tire have another go at it, is 3°20' ± 1°. This equates to a difference in CAMBER between the reading with wheels turned 20° left versus 20° right of 2°15' ±40'. You also need to assure that the steering box is at its true center when the wheels are pointed straight ahead. Since God only knows how many times the steering wheel may have been off & on the column in the last 37 years (and with no "master" spline, it could easily have been reinstalled a spline or two off) the pragmatic approach to this is to turn the wheels to full lock in either direction, checking that neither tire is contacting the beam/lower control arm before the Pitman arm hits its stops. Count the steering wheel turns from lock-to-lock (approximately 2-3/4) and put the wheel at exactly the halfway point - hopefully it'll be straight. If it is, when you adjust the the toe-in you should make equal changes in opposite directions on each tierod. If not, you may need to adjust one side more than the other. This assumes that nobody has changed the steering box or adjusted the stops since the car left the factory, in which case the stops need to be backed off until they'e ineffective so you can find the true steering box center and start over. Also, of course, that the beam, control arms. spindles & tierods are dead-true (never taken a shot that might've bent any of them a little) and that the ball joints and tierod ends have no excess slop in them. Sound daunting? The good news is that you can probably do just as good a job at home as you can expect from any chain-store with a rack trying to get the job done in the allotted time, and Standard Beetles aren't really that particular anyway (if you're even close, the worst that'll happen is the tires may wear slightly faster) ...so you may as well go for it! --- Courtney Hook <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I was just told that Canadian Tire couldn't do the > alignment on my 70 bug because they didn't have the > specs. I can't imagine an easier vehicle to do one > on, so thought, what the heck, I'll do it myself. I > seem to recall you could do one yourself with a tape > measure. Has anyone done one lately and remembers > the procedure? I posted it to the type 2 list as > well, because the front ends are the same design. > Thanks, > Courtney __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ vintagvw site list [email protected] http://lists.sjsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/vintagvw
