Note: Im a n00b to these forums. Mods, if you feel this serves a better purpose elsewhere, please move it there.

Preface: Your alignment is one of, if not the most critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to how your car or truck drives on a daily basis. Things such as camber, caster, toe and thrust angle all play a big part in making your car or truck track, accelerate, turn and stop like it needs to.

So with that said, and 600 miles on the odometer of my 2010 F150 King Ranch, I tackled the alignment today.

Disclaimer: Ive been aligning my own cars for about 10 years now. Id say Ive gotten fairly good at it by this point. I did this entire procedure today in less than 1hr and 15 minutes, and that included picture time. I have never ruined a set of tires that I didnt intentionally ruin, and those were mainly slicks or autocross dedicated sets.

That said, you can seriously shorten the life of your tires by doing this procedure incorrectly. I cant be held responsible for this. Anyone attempting this procedure should have some basic mechanical knowledge.

Ok, now that we have that out of the way, ONWARD!

Things you will need:
Basic mechanical knowledge, as previously mentioned
Basic understanding of geometry
Track width for your particular model vehicle. As I have a 2010, I found mine here:
http://www.fordvehicles.com/trucks/f150/specifications/
Four jackstands:

Fishing line:

A finely graduated ruler. This machinists ruler is what I use:

Four vinyl tiles. These can be found at Lowes or the like for cheap:

A 15mm and 24mm wrench:


A flat driveway generally helps as well, but we will get to that.

Optional equipment:
A digital level never hurts
Liquid patience:


Continued in next post...

 

Procedure:
While I know my garage floor is flat (less than 0.1* of slope), the truck is simply too large to fit in there with the staircase in the middle, so I had to resort to doing this on the driveway.
I began by taking level measurements where the red circles are:

The 0.5* is closest to the porch, 0.1* furthest away. Overall, its pretty level and definitely wont affect what we are doing here too badly. I wouldnt think of aligning my race car on this surface though.


Now, you want to take the vinyl tile sheets, grease the space between (I like to use white lithium grease, but use whatever you feel is best), sandwich them together, and drive onto them like so:


Sidenote: These are 12x12" tiles, and while they are fine for my racecar, Ill likely invest in something bigger for the truck due to the size of the contact patch.
IMPORTANT: Be sure when you pull onto the tiles that youve had a couple of feet to roll with the wheel perfectly straight. THIS HAS A LARGE BEARING ON THE OUTCOME OF YOUR ALIGNMENT! I cant stress this point enough.

String your fishing line and position the jackstands as pictured below:


Continued in third post...

 

Since the track on the 2010 is 67" front and rear, the distance from the string to the center of the wheels will be the same front and rear. Obviously, the rear (due to leaf spring and axle design) is non-adjustable, so you "run whatcha brung" back there. Up front though, we can change our toe. Camber and caster are more advanced techniques that the majority of people will need to see an alignment shop for. Their concepts are fairly hard to grasp without a good amount of experience, and lets be honest, there really isnt much need for a "performance" alignment like my racecar.

So, onward we go. We want to get the distance from the strings to the hubs to 100mm. I like 100mm because its a nice, arbitrary number, and in this case, its far enough out to avoid the running boards on this truck.


Note: In many of the pictures, Im not exactly on my measurements. Its hard to hold a camera and a ruler at the same time.
Front:

Rear:

Now that you have your "rack" essentially "zero'd out", we can get down to business. By knowing the track width and the distance to the hubs, the strings are now parallel with the frame. This does assume no frame damage or irregularities.

For purposes of example, my Miata has a difference of 19mm front to rear, with the rear being wider. In this case, I set the front to 100mm from the hub and the rear to 90.5mm from the hub to square the strings with the frame.

You want to measure the leading edge and the trailing edge of the wheel like so:


Example: If your front edge is 108mm and your rear edge is 104mm, your truck has TOE IN, meaning the wheel(s) are pointed inward. If the numbers were reversed, your truck has TOE OUT, meaning the wheels are pointed outward.

Now that we know our measurements, we can get down to adjusting them.

Underneath the truck are the tie rods for the steering rack, and this is where your adjustment is made. If your wheel was turned to either side when you parked, this is where that becomes an issue. Hopefully, its straight though.
You want to position your wrenches as shown:

The 21mm goes closest to the hub, 15mm goes on the tie rod.
Protip: Longer wrenches mean more leverage, and thats a good thing when your bolts were turned by Jethro in Dearborn.

Once you have the nut loose, you can go about turning the rod to bring your toe in line. When looking at the wheel itself (from the centerline of the truck) turning CLOCKWISE brings the front of the wheel in. COUNTERCLOCKWISE pushes the front of the wheel out. This is where the greased vinyl squares are handy, because they allow the wheel to move, and for you to check your measurements. A general rule of thumb is that 1/6th turn on the rod is about 2mm toe in either direction. Again, its a GENERAL rule.


Once youve gotten your toe where you want it, snug the 24mm bolt back up.
Important: You MUST hold the tie rod still when tightening that bolt. If the tie rod moves, your alignment will be off and youll have to readjust.

Once youre tightened up, youre good to go.

It generally takes me about an hour and thirty minutes to do a four wheel alignment including thrust angle. About 2.5 hours if I tinker with camber. This would easily take me 45 minutes from set up to tear down.

Ive had the alignment checked on a Hunter on my Miata after I aligned it, and the machine wont read less than 1/32 of an inch. It read zero for that particular alignment. You can achieve very good results on your own, all it takes is time, patience, and hopefully the know-how that you got from this guide.

 

Excellent contribution to the site! I will copy this to the Articles and How To section. Thanks!

 

great write up, have to try this one myself.

my biggest beef is with ford, a 2010 nc truck has a spindle that looks like that? Why can't they coat things like this, driveshafts, seat rails, etc. with anything, oil, paint, powder coating.

 

Oh, I tend to agree. Im sure Ford has their reasons, and its probably saving money.

As long as it lasts me a while, I could care less. I bought it to be a truck, not to win beauty contests. Thats what my wife is for.

 

while that is a pretty good method for setting toe in a driveway situation you didnt really go into detail on how you would check and measure camber/caster

also most vehicles are specified to have a slight bit of toe in like .03* on each side, since as you drive down the road the wheels will want to track away from eachother, so by doing a slight toe in you can compensate for that and they will drive straight.

 

OMG. You're kidding me right? You have a new 2010 with 600 miles on it and your doing the alignment in your front yard. you have a new truck take it to Ford and tell them to fix it. As for the string trick I see your idea in theory will work, but many factors can cause an alignment to be off. I would suggest to anyone who think they can do this. to spend the money and get it done right.

BTW: Your drive way is not level you're using a foot long level for a 10ft span. WTF?

 

I didnt for a reason. On most vehicles, changing camber has a large amount of crosstalk into your toe measurement. And, on a vehicle like this with soft sidewalls and tall tires, having lots of camber doesnt do you as much good as having a performance tire.

Setting caster is also quite a challenge which takes 2-3 times as long as a normal alignment.

In general, people who are really tinkering with camber and caster are driving performance vehicles and need performance alignments.



Ford wont fix it. They are going to give me the standard "Well, its within factory specs" argument, and it very well may be. That still doesnt change the fact that the factory specs are broad enough to drive a truck through, pun intended.

As for the string theory, its a tried and true method of setting toe, but it does assume that your frame is true, a concession I made in my original posts. And again, I have been aligning my own vehicles for quite a long time using this method, and I have never had any uneven wear and tear on my tires with the exception of race tires... and thats generally because I run those tires on -3.0* of camber and 7.5mm of toe out on each side.

The whole purpose of this post was to show other folks how its done, and give them some options. Sure, you could just pay someone $100 and be done with it, but I imagine some people are knowledgable enough to be able to do this on their own. I am one of those people. If I spent the time and money to pay someone to do this for me, Id spend an entire weekend at the track and all of my money having someone align the car.

Coincidentally, I have a rack like this:

for my racecar. If you venture to the track for the weekend, youll see every other car using a similar setup to align their cars. Like I said, its a pretty tried and true method assuming you have the know-how and patience to make it work.