I’m looking for some advice, incite or things to conceder. My race/ street car is just about finished getting built. I have replaced just about every suspension part and added other parts that are adjustable. Car will need an alignment and I was wondering how to go about this? Do I just drop the car off and tell them I want an alignment and have them look up a stock 94 Honda civic or do I tell them what I want? If the second what do I want? More to it is I want the car as low as I can get it but also keep drivability and high enough that I wont have issues loading and unloading this on the car trailer. Then what about my traction bars?
I don’t know a thing about this subject so take it easy on me.
Height you’re going to need to figure out before you go in. If you change the height of the car it will affect the alignment, so you need to figure that out before you take it in.
Traction bars is also something you’re going to need to adjust yourself.
The only thing the shop is going to align is your tow, caster, and camber settings.
As for what to set things to, I’m not sure. Factory is always a good balance between performance and tire wear. On my Firebird I got some recommended settings from a well known professional road-racer, and just took it to a shop and asked to have them use these settings instead of factory.
I think it really depends on what your plans are. If you just wanna drive it for now and finish sorting out bugs, Id just set it to a resonalbe height (remember lower doenst mean better) and have a stock alignment done. Then you can tweak things as you move forward with the project.
Also how you align it will depend on what sort of racing you plan on doing and what your preferences are.
Personally Id think a decent place to start, if you want to go beyond a stock alignment, would be something like
Front
-1.5 deg camber, 1/8" total toe out (this should help the car turn in some, if you are interested in that)
Rear
Stock camber, 0 toe
This may not apply at all to a Honda, its just somethign I have done on my VWs and the cavy previously. :shrug:
Thanks for all the input guys. My first priority is making sure its aligned good enough for the dyno. I think I have the car at a good height as it sits but haven’t had it on the trailer yet. Not sure about the spring rates, that’s something I do need to look into once I get this going. So drag racing, 1/4 mile and some street driving but not very often, looking for 11’s or better, probably around 120 to 140mph as a guess? No sway bars. The Dunn tire down here charges 60 bucks so I just thought I would try to get the most out of my buck. I did look up the poor mans alignment using string and all that but for all the time and not knowing what Im doing Id rather pay the 60.
So set the height where I want, adjust the traction bars and have them do a stock alignment, at least for now?
well if it’s a drag car, you may want to get everything as close to zero as possible as far as toe and camber go (maybe like 1/32 toe-in in the front so its super tame). For springs, super stiff in the rear and I’d highly suggest traction bars or something to help preload the front.
why no sway bars? Be careful of dropping the car very much without a camber kit, a bunch of negative camber in the front will hurt your straight line traction. If you have adjustable coilovers you can jack up the rear a little bit higher than the front and that should help, how stiff are your springs? If you have seriously stiff locomotive springs then you need a shock that can control them, because if you dont, youll have the dreaded bounce and the handling wont be as good as it should be, so just keep that in mind because alot of cheap coilover springs for hondas are like 500lb/in springs
Well I never got sway bars b/c I didn’t think I needed them for going straight? Like I said I don’t know much about this subject. But Im ready to learn! I don’t want to drop the car to much, like I said I want to be able to load and off loan this car quick and easy. I do want the car to sit lower then stock. I have ground control coil over’s but don’t know exactly what they are, the shocks are adjustable. I have the paperwork at home.
6 point roll bar
BLOX rear camber kit
Lakewood traction bars
KYB AGX shocks
Ground control coil overs
Well here is what I have, basically stock with some adjustability.
There is a stiffening bar that I can get for in front of the steering rack. Is that worth anything to me?
ground controls will be fine, they are quite a bit stiffer than stock but they arent crazy. Me personally, I would run sway bars because ive felt cars without them and didnt care for the feel without them esp in the front. It was pretty noticeable to me, it should be a cheap bolt on even with stock parts, so I would run them, esp in the front.