cudak888
Well-Known Member
Yes, this is both a snarky jab at this thread and @gtxrt's outdated ideas as to what constitutes good alignment specs for a B-body and a mindbarf of my thoughts and experiences about Mopar suspension. In my not-so-humble opinion, I'm hoping this thread might actually help those of us who are new to B-bodies.
Granted, I'm not sure how many I'm preaching to - the old car market is completely and totally plucking nuts for young people today and I'm not seeing that many young people taking on B-bodies if they haven't outright inherited them - but what the hell, that complete snafu of an advice thread needed a counterpoint rant thread to unpfluck it. And this is it.
As a relative novice to Mopars (only about 6-7 years as an owner w/only a 20k-mile A-body and my worn-to-hell-and-mechanically-refreshed '68 Satellite, plus some wheel time behind some other local A and B-bodies), if you want to understand Mopar suspension, advice #1 is to run away from threads where the information is fractured between 10 smart guys trying to explain to one or two curmugeons that they're wrong. Sadly, there's a whole lot of good information buried in that thread that's also incoherent for newcomers who are trying to wrap their head around why a B-body's suspension is more inscrutable than a tripolar girlfriend. If you're still trying to wrap your head around why your old Mopar handles like a wet noodle, you're just going to come out of this more confused than anyone.
I've come to grips with B-body suspension the hard way - research from reading the forum (especially @Kern Dog - I owe you more than a few beers for the outstanding advice you've posted over the years), reading up on suspension in general, experimentation on my own cars and throwing money at them judiciously (that's why it took so long to get here), and the knowledge gained from the whole enchilada. And no, I'm not done learning yet - as you'll see - but I thought now is a good enough time to start a thread about it.
Full disclosure: This is also my own way of looking at it. Maybe I'm the one that's wrong, but this has worked for me. Maybe it will for you. Or maybe it won't and I'm a moron - either way, I'm sure you'll let me know in the replies.
That said:
In my experience, lousy A/B-body steering feel can be exacerbated by one or all of these things:
-- No corrections to overcome factory suspension geometry designed for bias-plys
-- Bad alignment settings
-- Worn suspension components
-- The stock feeling of a Mopar steering box
All of these can work together to confuse the living hell out of you, especially as the result may not be what you expect. Let me try to break it down for you:
Got it? Good. (If absolutely nothing else, do your inner and outer tie rod ends, idler arm, lower control arm bushings, and strut rod bushings. The tie rod ends will play havoc with your toe adjustment, the strut rod affects your caster, and your LCAs will be flopping around everywhere if you leave them crusty).
Secondly, the geometry on our cars' suspension is designed for bias-ply tires and even then, it absolutely sucks. Chris Birdsong went down the rabbit hole of this recently, and if you're new to A/B suspension, don't even LOOK at his (excellent) video, because you don't need to know about correcting roll center (not now, anyway). You must walk before you run, grasshopper.
Also, it sucks worse for A-body owners because you can't get good caster with those cars without offset bushings or different upper control arms. We're playing in the B-body sandbox here right now though, so never mind the Dennis Weavermobiles.
First: Your ride height needs to be set right. Everything starts with that, and since our cars have torsion bars, any idiot can go down to the lower control arm and start futzing around with it. I won't explain how to adjust it - there are a bunch of other threads that establish this, and it's not difficult - but my word of advice is to ignore any measurements from the tire to any body part. If your camber happens to be wacky from left to right, there's no point in this measurement. Just get the car to where it's level or nose down a bit (another bit of advice by @Kern Dog - the geometry of our suspension tends to work a bit better if lower) and use the measurement of the adjuster bolt head to the lower control arm as your data point for leveling one side to the other. Again, if your camber is wacky, the correct measurement at the LCA's may look completely wrong when you look at the car (before everything else gets adjusted) - case in point, not only was the left side of my Satellite lower by 1cm on one side, the top of the wheel was tucked in an entire 1.5" further away from the fender due to excessive camber.
And another thing to get tripped on here: Roll the car a lot when setting the torsion bar height. You'll probably be jacking it to get the load off the bolt, but that'll also get the front of your car to to sit like a Volkswagen with a swing axle if you let the tread off the ground when doing so. Take note that the old "bounce it" advice for settling the suspension is about as helpful as a porcupine at a nudist colony - it doesn't work unless you have the wheels on turn plates so the tires can slide into their happy place. Otherwise, if you're doing it the way I've done it - tread to concrete (a.k.a. the cheaparse lazy method) - it doesn't work; the tread needs to find its happy place and settle. Doesn't matter if it looks wrong, just make sure the wheels aren't at an aggressively pinched V shape mimicking what it looked like when the wheels were off the ground.
Second: You've seen this skosh chart reposted a million times (thank you @toolmanmike for invoking it as early as post #2 in the original thread), and you can now look at it for the 1,000,001th time:
If you're just looking to start from a decent baseline, heed these numbers. This has been reposted a bajillion times for good reason: It pretty much is a great starting point for any old RWD street (not track) car from this era with conventional control arms.
If you can reliably get anywhere between:
1. -0.5 to -1 degree of negative camber,
2. As much caster as you can get (if you can get "too much caster," you've already modified your car, probably know more than a newbie, and shouldn't be reading this Cudak888's B-body Alignment for Dummies post),
3. 1/16" of toe in
...then you should have a baseline that will result in a car that, if nothing else, tracks straight.
And you know what? There's a good chance you'll still be asking why your steering feels light and disconnected from the road.
Over my own years of ownership, I waded through all the threads on alignment here and at FABO I could shake a stick at. After stopping my head from spinning - first from all the information and secondly from all the money I threw at my pile of crap car - I realized you can still get lost even with the most straightforward advice, because even with ideal alignment settings, our cars - with stock components and corrected alignment for radials - will still feel "wrong" if your prior experience with 1970's steering is exclusive to Saganaw-style boxes. i.e., what you would find in GM vehicles and Fords made after the '60s (the ones that ditched the Rube Goldberg hydraulic ram for the Saganaw box - sadly, I can't comment on the ram steering as I've never driven a car with it).
My entire experience since childhood was with Fords (go ahead, sue me) built between 1971-1979 with Saganaw boxes. They're soft and overboosted, but they do not feel - in the spot-on words of @Kern Dog in one of the most important posts I've ever read on any Mopar forum - "like the tires are hanging in the air and not connected to the road."
The Mopar box feels like this, but when the only words used to describe all old car steering is "soft," "overboosted," or "one finger turns," there's no data point for the variations within old car steering. Take my word for it, trying to equate the feel of a Mopar box and a Saganaw box together is like trying to draw correlaries between a Mopar box and the super-tight rack-and-pinion on, say, a BMW E39 ("...cooooming up!"). They're different, and if it wasn't for the internet running with old car stereotypes, perhaps there'd be more information out there about how a Bendix/Garrison power ram feels vs. a Saginaw box vs. a Mopar box, vs. - I don't know, a Rover 3500 P6 power steering box (I want one).
Hey, I don't have the money or time to buy them all to find out and report back myself. Someone go find Derek Tam Hyphen Scott and make him do it.
Thing is, I must have spent years questioning this - I did so when I bought my Mopars, when I modified my '68 Satellite, when I went to the alignment shop with it and forced them to put in good specs and not the old bias-ply specs that somehow persist in all the commercial machines, and I kept asking this question after replacing every last bushing and tie rod end, throwing on Firm Feel caster-corrected UCAs, and having it re-aligned. (It has FMJ spindles in it, by the way, just so the Ehrenbergites can freak out).
Exhibit A: How to waste your money
Important: The caster-corrected UCAs were supposed to give me all the caster in the world. And it did: The damn thing now had, according to the shop, 6 degrees of caster, -1.5 of camber, and 0.11 degrees of toe. And it still didn't self-center or track straight, drove like crap, and the left wheel had enough camber in it to be a Honda Civic.
So, two days ago - after finishing a million other problems on the car and at least three years since the last trip to the shop - I finally - finally - went ahead and did a home brew alignment on it. Found a spot of the broken driveway where the car sat within a degree of being dead level, and went to town.
I figured I couldn't eff it up any worse than the shop.
Exhibit B: "Would you buy a used Mopar from this man? Your answer, should you be sane, is 'no.'"
I used a Joe's bubble gauge, one of those fancy clamps that fastens to the rim (because I don't want to be limited to the alignment bubble attached to a hub - I believe the Joes bubble gauge can't do so in the first place, unlike the Longacre models), and for toe, I used el-cheapo plates that rest on the side of the wheel (with modifications so they'd touch the rim and not the bulging tire) and one of those stick-style gauges, and also tested an old Align-A-Matic.
The plates - can post pics of the modifications later
The "stick-style" toe gauge, el Chinesium edition
The Align-A-Matic. This is the eBay picture. You can guess how well it worked.
I found about EIGHT degrees of positive caster on both sides, -2 degrees of camber on the left, -1.5 neg on the right, and enough toe in for a flock of pigeons. The car was riding an inch lower on one side because of the excess camber pulling the suspension down, even though the bolt heads on the LCA's were dead level at 1-1/16" out, each.
I farted with it for a couple of hours yesterday, and I'm pretty confident I got to +7 degrees caster after aiming for -0.5 camber and winding up closer to -0.75. I also found that the right tie rod adjuster was almost entirely wound in, but not the other side - and just by eyeballing the car and the steering wheel set straight, I wound up with roughly 1/16" toe in and just about equal threads on both sides - as one might expect. I was equally surprised to find that the plates worked very well, as did the cheap-looking stick-and-gauge tool, but the Align-A-Matic was completely off (eBay time - LOL).
And so I took it for a drive. I figured that now I confirmed how much caster I have, it couldn't be too bad.
Well, going right back to @Kern Dog's Most Important Words of Wisdom Ever:
And now I know this for sure.
Point 1: It tracked straight and felt 10 times better, if compared with how it felt before. Moral of this story, #1: Do your own effing alignments.
Point 2: It feels EXACTLY as Kern Dog says - as if the front end is being yanked off the ground at 120mph and getting light.
Point 3: It also somewhat self-centers now, but still needs a bit of a yank during the last quarter of the turn. And now I know that's how these damn things feel even with seven freaking degrees of caster in them, even if the box is self centering correctly.
So I both succeeded (#1) and found out that what I'm after will never happen with a stock steering box (#2 and #3).
More importantly, without going through this entire rigamarole first hand, I would have never really understood what I was dealing with and would still be questioning why seven degrees of caster wasn't resulting in neck-snapping return-to-center behavior and further second-guessing even the good information on the forums. It's a testament to: A. Why it's so important for alignment information to be correct and well presented (a.k.a. free of BS), and B. Why there's NO substitute for hands-on experience and a good mentor with even more experience (we put our faith in Blast Hardchees- I mean Kern Dog!) to explain when something simply doesn't add up.
I can't recall anything I've done in the last five years that's taken me to school harder than this - no amount of caster on our cars can make up for the steering box, at least, how I expected it to act with the increased caster.
What's more, @Kern Dog yet again dropped the greatest wisdom (and a great big middle finger to my pocket book - I was already fretting the cost of the FFI box) with this:
Now, maybe I'm blowing smoke out my own butt, but I had to vent after reading all the nonsense that @gtxrt was posting in the other thread. Yea, he's entitled to his opinions, but alignment is too important a functional safety feature of any car for actual BS to sit around the internet thick as peanut butter, especially when - again, in my not-so-humble opinion - straight answers are hard to come by. It's even harder to find words of true experience like Kern's that actually reflect the various aftermarket fixes for them and are worded in a way that one can understand the tactile differences of each box through mere words.
I'd add more to this, but I don't really have anything else to say...so here's a photo of the '68 Satty, because
-Kurt
Granted, I'm not sure how many I'm preaching to - the old car market is completely and totally plucking nuts for young people today and I'm not seeing that many young people taking on B-bodies if they haven't outright inherited them - but what the hell, that complete snafu of an advice thread needed a counterpoint rant thread to unpfluck it. And this is it.
As a relative novice to Mopars (only about 6-7 years as an owner w/only a 20k-mile A-body and my worn-to-hell-and-mechanically-refreshed '68 Satellite, plus some wheel time behind some other local A and B-bodies), if you want to understand Mopar suspension, advice #1 is to run away from threads where the information is fractured between 10 smart guys trying to explain to one or two curmugeons that they're wrong. Sadly, there's a whole lot of good information buried in that thread that's also incoherent for newcomers who are trying to wrap their head around why a B-body's suspension is more inscrutable than a tripolar girlfriend. If you're still trying to wrap your head around why your old Mopar handles like a wet noodle, you're just going to come out of this more confused than anyone.
I've come to grips with B-body suspension the hard way - research from reading the forum (especially @Kern Dog - I owe you more than a few beers for the outstanding advice you've posted over the years), reading up on suspension in general, experimentation on my own cars and throwing money at them judiciously (that's why it took so long to get here), and the knowledge gained from the whole enchilada. And no, I'm not done learning yet - as you'll see - but I thought now is a good enough time to start a thread about it.
Full disclosure: This is also my own way of looking at it. Maybe I'm the one that's wrong, but this has worked for me. Maybe it will for you. Or maybe it won't and I'm a moron - either way, I'm sure you'll let me know in the replies.
That said:
In my experience, lousy A/B-body steering feel can be exacerbated by one or all of these things:
-- No corrections to overcome factory suspension geometry designed for bias-plys
-- Bad alignment settings
-- Worn suspension components
-- The stock feeling of a Mopar steering box
All of these can work together to confuse the living hell out of you, especially as the result may not be what you expect. Let me try to break it down for you:
Got it? Good. (If absolutely nothing else, do your inner and outer tie rod ends, idler arm, lower control arm bushings, and strut rod bushings. The tie rod ends will play havoc with your toe adjustment, the strut rod affects your caster, and your LCAs will be flopping around everywhere if you leave them crusty).
Secondly, the geometry on our cars' suspension is designed for bias-ply tires and even then, it absolutely sucks. Chris Birdsong went down the rabbit hole of this recently, and if you're new to A/B suspension, don't even LOOK at his (excellent) video, because you don't need to know about correcting roll center (not now, anyway). You must walk before you run, grasshopper.
Also, it sucks worse for A-body owners because you can't get good caster with those cars without offset bushings or different upper control arms. We're playing in the B-body sandbox here right now though, so never mind the Dennis Weavermobiles.
First: Your ride height needs to be set right. Everything starts with that, and since our cars have torsion bars, any idiot can go down to the lower control arm and start futzing around with it. I won't explain how to adjust it - there are a bunch of other threads that establish this, and it's not difficult - but my word of advice is to ignore any measurements from the tire to any body part. If your camber happens to be wacky from left to right, there's no point in this measurement. Just get the car to where it's level or nose down a bit (another bit of advice by @Kern Dog - the geometry of our suspension tends to work a bit better if lower) and use the measurement of the adjuster bolt head to the lower control arm as your data point for leveling one side to the other. Again, if your camber is wacky, the correct measurement at the LCA's may look completely wrong when you look at the car (before everything else gets adjusted) - case in point, not only was the left side of my Satellite lower by 1cm on one side, the top of the wheel was tucked in an entire 1.5" further away from the fender due to excessive camber.
And another thing to get tripped on here: Roll the car a lot when setting the torsion bar height. You'll probably be jacking it to get the load off the bolt, but that'll also get the front of your car to to sit like a Volkswagen with a swing axle if you let the tread off the ground when doing so. Take note that the old "bounce it" advice for settling the suspension is about as helpful as a porcupine at a nudist colony - it doesn't work unless you have the wheels on turn plates so the tires can slide into their happy place. Otherwise, if you're doing it the way I've done it - tread to concrete (a.k.a. the cheaparse lazy method) - it doesn't work; the tread needs to find its happy place and settle. Doesn't matter if it looks wrong, just make sure the wheels aren't at an aggressively pinched V shape mimicking what it looked like when the wheels were off the ground.
Second: You've seen this skosh chart reposted a million times (thank you @toolmanmike for invoking it as early as post #2 in the original thread), and you can now look at it for the 1,000,001th time:
If you're just looking to start from a decent baseline, heed these numbers. This has been reposted a bajillion times for good reason: It pretty much is a great starting point for any old RWD street (not track) car from this era with conventional control arms.
If you can reliably get anywhere between:
1. -0.5 to -1 degree of negative camber,
2. As much caster as you can get (if you can get "too much caster," you've already modified your car, probably know more than a newbie, and shouldn't be reading this Cudak888's B-body Alignment for Dummies post),
3. 1/16" of toe in
...then you should have a baseline that will result in a car that, if nothing else, tracks straight.
And you know what? There's a good chance you'll still be asking why your steering feels light and disconnected from the road.
Over my own years of ownership, I waded through all the threads on alignment here and at FABO I could shake a stick at. After stopping my head from spinning - first from all the information and secondly from all the money I threw at my pile of crap car - I realized you can still get lost even with the most straightforward advice, because even with ideal alignment settings, our cars - with stock components and corrected alignment for radials - will still feel "wrong" if your prior experience with 1970's steering is exclusive to Saganaw-style boxes. i.e., what you would find in GM vehicles and Fords made after the '60s (the ones that ditched the Rube Goldberg hydraulic ram for the Saganaw box - sadly, I can't comment on the ram steering as I've never driven a car with it).
My entire experience since childhood was with Fords (go ahead, sue me) built between 1971-1979 with Saganaw boxes. They're soft and overboosted, but they do not feel - in the spot-on words of @Kern Dog in one of the most important posts I've ever read on any Mopar forum - "like the tires are hanging in the air and not connected to the road."
The Mopar box feels like this, but when the only words used to describe all old car steering is "soft," "overboosted," or "one finger turns," there's no data point for the variations within old car steering. Take my word for it, trying to equate the feel of a Mopar box and a Saganaw box together is like trying to draw correlaries between a Mopar box and the super-tight rack-and-pinion on, say, a BMW E39 ("...cooooming up!"). They're different, and if it wasn't for the internet running with old car stereotypes, perhaps there'd be more information out there about how a Bendix/Garrison power ram feels vs. a Saginaw box vs. a Mopar box, vs. - I don't know, a Rover 3500 P6 power steering box (I want one).
Hey, I don't have the money or time to buy them all to find out and report back myself. Someone go find Derek Tam Hyphen Scott and make him do it.
Thing is, I must have spent years questioning this - I did so when I bought my Mopars, when I modified my '68 Satellite, when I went to the alignment shop with it and forced them to put in good specs and not the old bias-ply specs that somehow persist in all the commercial machines, and I kept asking this question after replacing every last bushing and tie rod end, throwing on Firm Feel caster-corrected UCAs, and having it re-aligned. (It has FMJ spindles in it, by the way, just so the Ehrenbergites can freak out).
Exhibit A: How to waste your money
Important: The caster-corrected UCAs were supposed to give me all the caster in the world. And it did: The damn thing now had, according to the shop, 6 degrees of caster, -1.5 of camber, and 0.11 degrees of toe. And it still didn't self-center or track straight, drove like crap, and the left wheel had enough camber in it to be a Honda Civic.
So, two days ago - after finishing a million other problems on the car and at least three years since the last trip to the shop - I finally - finally - went ahead and did a home brew alignment on it. Found a spot of the broken driveway where the car sat within a degree of being dead level, and went to town.
I figured I couldn't eff it up any worse than the shop.
Exhibit B: "Would you buy a used Mopar from this man? Your answer, should you be sane, is 'no.'"
I used a Joe's bubble gauge, one of those fancy clamps that fastens to the rim (because I don't want to be limited to the alignment bubble attached to a hub - I believe the Joes bubble gauge can't do so in the first place, unlike the Longacre models), and for toe, I used el-cheapo plates that rest on the side of the wheel (with modifications so they'd touch the rim and not the bulging tire) and one of those stick-style gauges, and also tested an old Align-A-Matic.
The plates - can post pics of the modifications later
The "stick-style" toe gauge, el Chinesium edition
The Align-A-Matic. This is the eBay picture. You can guess how well it worked.
I found about EIGHT degrees of positive caster on both sides, -2 degrees of camber on the left, -1.5 neg on the right, and enough toe in for a flock of pigeons. The car was riding an inch lower on one side because of the excess camber pulling the suspension down, even though the bolt heads on the LCA's were dead level at 1-1/16" out, each.
I farted with it for a couple of hours yesterday, and I'm pretty confident I got to +7 degrees caster after aiming for -0.5 camber and winding up closer to -0.75. I also found that the right tie rod adjuster was almost entirely wound in, but not the other side - and just by eyeballing the car and the steering wheel set straight, I wound up with roughly 1/16" toe in and just about equal threads on both sides - as one might expect. I was equally surprised to find that the plates worked very well, as did the cheap-looking stick-and-gauge tool, but the Align-A-Matic was completely off (eBay time - LOL).
And so I took it for a drive. I figured that now I confirmed how much caster I have, it couldn't be too bad.
Well, going right back to @Kern Dog's Most Important Words of Wisdom Ever:
And now I know this for sure.
Point 1: It tracked straight and felt 10 times better, if compared with how it felt before. Moral of this story, #1: Do your own effing alignments.
Point 2: It feels EXACTLY as Kern Dog says - as if the front end is being yanked off the ground at 120mph and getting light.
Point 3: It also somewhat self-centers now, but still needs a bit of a yank during the last quarter of the turn. And now I know that's how these damn things feel even with seven freaking degrees of caster in them, even if the box is self centering correctly.
So I both succeeded (#1) and found out that what I'm after will never happen with a stock steering box (#2 and #3).
More importantly, without going through this entire rigamarole first hand, I would have never really understood what I was dealing with and would still be questioning why seven degrees of caster wasn't resulting in neck-snapping return-to-center behavior and further second-guessing even the good information on the forums. It's a testament to: A. Why it's so important for alignment information to be correct and well presented (a.k.a. free of BS), and B. Why there's NO substitute for hands-on experience and a good mentor with even more experience (we put our faith in Blast Hardchees- I mean Kern Dog!) to explain when something simply doesn't add up.
I can't recall anything I've done in the last five years that's taken me to school harder than this - no amount of caster on our cars can make up for the steering box, at least, how I expected it to act with the increased caster.
What's more, @Kern Dog yet again dropped the greatest wisdom (and a great big middle finger to my pocket book - I was already fretting the cost of the FFI box) with this:
I've been looking for something substantive like this regarding the FFI/S&G/Borgeson boxes for a long time, especially when David Freiburger emptied his pocketbook to install the Borgeson on General Mayhem. I knew there had to be something in it for him to spend $1k above the cost of an FFI box for that beautifully restored rotbox (don't get me wrong, I love General Mayhem and know it's a darn fine B-body ever since Birdsong restored the unibody). Kern's comments above answered every other question I had.
Now, maybe I'm blowing smoke out my own butt, but I had to vent after reading all the nonsense that @gtxrt was posting in the other thread. Yea, he's entitled to his opinions, but alignment is too important a functional safety feature of any car for actual BS to sit around the internet thick as peanut butter, especially when - again, in my not-so-humble opinion - straight answers are hard to come by. It's even harder to find words of true experience like Kern's that actually reflect the various aftermarket fixes for them and are worded in a way that one can understand the tactile differences of each box through mere words.
I'd add more to this, but I don't really have anything else to say...so here's a photo of the '68 Satty, because
-Kurt
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