Having rebuilt great chunks of the front end of the Zed or, at least, fitted less leaky shocks and less buggered wishbones, I finally had a rush of blood to the head Sunday afternoon and thought I should really do something about the tracking. It's been doing the car park squeal and I can't hit the right notes to join in so I thought I ought to shut it up, and out come the bits of string and the workshop grade metal ruler.
I have been doing my own tracking for years after going to a real tyre place with actual laser-guided, song-and-dance inducing, magic geometry setting equipment that then made a complete horlicks of my E46 because they wouldn't listen when I pointed out I was running a staggered setup rather than the square that it rolled out of the factory with. As a result they adjusted the passenger side rear wheel to point at the driver's side front and announced it still needed to come round a bit more.
At that point I left, lay in the car park to adjust the rear wheel near straight and went away to learn. The upshot is that you take two bits of fishing line, set them parallel to each other and to the car, and measure from there to the front and rear of the rims and do a bit of trigenometry.
Anyway, at the risk of getting within spitting distance of the point, one of the things needed is to know things like the front and rear track widths of the car and the offset of any wheels. This latter point was one of the reasons its taken me so long to get round to this; I've mostly had the factory staggered 18s on, but in a fit of meanness, I'm currently running non-staggered 17s. All I need now is the front and rear track widths because, as everyone knows, the Zed is wider at its rear - too many cakes, maybe? The rear wheels are further out than the front.
Google knows everything, did you know that? You can ask for anything and get an answer. So I searched for track widths and, up they come, 1473mm front, 1523mm rear. 50mm wider; 25mm a side.
But it would bloody help if they were right.
I've set up, I've put my string 80mm from a point in the middle of my front wheel and 55mm from the same point on the rears. I do measuring and, according to this, I have more toe-in than a Chinese foot binding ceremony. It ought to sound like the Halleluiah chorus in car parks.
Thankfully, before I got carried away and welded extensions to my tie rods, I dug out tape measures and a plumb bob and found my strings weren't parallel.
It turns out the E85 track difference is only 30mm, 15mm either side. Which is what then drove a lot of Fawlty-esque ranting and blaming bloody Wilson about the crap on the internet. Grr.
If anyone is still awake, I also measured the distance between hub pivot point and tie-rod joint - it's 125mm - which meant I could halve the 8mm discrepency between front and rear faces of each wheel into, turn it into 2 and a bit mm at the tie-rod (simple ratio between that and the rim radius), divide that by the pitch of the tie rod adjuster (1.5mm thread) and find I needed 1.39 turns (1 turn + 90 degrees + 45 degrees + loose change) outward each side. I throw this in for my own reference down the line as I can't reach under the Z to repeatedly adjust and re-measure. Needed to do calculations and then jack it up and do aggravating things with spanners.
That is the end of this rant; you may now return to your corn flakes.
I have been doing my own tracking for years after going to a real tyre place with actual laser-guided, song-and-dance inducing, magic geometry setting equipment that then made a complete horlicks of my E46 because they wouldn't listen when I pointed out I was running a staggered setup rather than the square that it rolled out of the factory with. As a result they adjusted the passenger side rear wheel to point at the driver's side front and announced it still needed to come round a bit more.
At that point I left, lay in the car park to adjust the rear wheel near straight and went away to learn. The upshot is that you take two bits of fishing line, set them parallel to each other and to the car, and measure from there to the front and rear of the rims and do a bit of trigenometry.
Anyway, at the risk of getting within spitting distance of the point, one of the things needed is to know things like the front and rear track widths of the car and the offset of any wheels. This latter point was one of the reasons its taken me so long to get round to this; I've mostly had the factory staggered 18s on, but in a fit of meanness, I'm currently running non-staggered 17s. All I need now is the front and rear track widths because, as everyone knows, the Zed is wider at its rear - too many cakes, maybe? The rear wheels are further out than the front.
Google knows everything, did you know that? You can ask for anything and get an answer. So I searched for track widths and, up they come, 1473mm front, 1523mm rear. 50mm wider; 25mm a side.
But it would bloody help if they were right.
I've set up, I've put my string 80mm from a point in the middle of my front wheel and 55mm from the same point on the rears. I do measuring and, according to this, I have more toe-in than a Chinese foot binding ceremony. It ought to sound like the Halleluiah chorus in car parks.
Thankfully, before I got carried away and welded extensions to my tie rods, I dug out tape measures and a plumb bob and found my strings weren't parallel.
It turns out the E85 track difference is only 30mm, 15mm either side. Which is what then drove a lot of Fawlty-esque ranting and blaming bloody Wilson about the crap on the internet. Grr.
If anyone is still awake, I also measured the distance between hub pivot point and tie-rod joint - it's 125mm - which meant I could halve the 8mm discrepency between front and rear faces of each wheel into, turn it into 2 and a bit mm at the tie-rod (simple ratio between that and the rim radius), divide that by the pitch of the tie rod adjuster (1.5mm thread) and find I needed 1.39 turns (1 turn + 90 degrees + 45 degrees + loose change) outward each side. I throw this in for my own reference down the line as I can't reach under the Z to repeatedly adjust and re-measure. Needed to do calculations and then jack it up and do aggravating things with spanners.
That is the end of this rant; you may now return to your corn flakes.
