alignment specs for a 73 challenger

[hpjunke]

i had my challenger aligned by and old school guy not to long ago .. he doesn't use the lasers and machines like most shops have . I took the car over to him because most wont touch my car because its lowered and has billet wheels however it still doesnt feel right .. seems as if it likes to wander when it goes over a slight bump or at high speeds .It doesnt pull right or left and according to him the camber is at 0 which he said is maxed out on adjustment for my car. he dosent have a problem re doing it im just wondering where he got his specs for it .. thanks for you help guys ..


this is how how low it sits

 

[moparleo]

Actually there are no specs for a lowered car. Your wandering is because of caster. Unless you replace the upper control arms with longer aftermarket arms you will never get the alignment even close to what you need. Remember that the suspension was engineered to have the caster and camber angles set a certain ride height. Whenever you change the ride height , all of the angles change. The factory can only the engineer the suspension to have a limited amount of adjustment. You will never get a proper alignment as long as the car is lowered. If you insist on keeping the car lower than stock, you have a few options.
Number one, replace the spindles with special made lowering spindles. This lowers the car without cranking the torsion bars down , which just bottoms out the front suspension causing a lousy, hard, unstable ride. The custom spindles lower the car without changing the torsion bar setting or affecting the normal amount of suspension travel that was built into the front end.
Number two, is to replace the upper control arms with tubular aftermarket control arms. There are several companies making them. They are designed to give you more caster and camber adjustment to make the front suspension feel more controlable.

Any time you try to reengineer something on the car, you are just going to cause problems that must also be modified.
The domino effect.

 

[Chryco Psycho]

max out the caster 3* + if you can get there , turn the front adjusteras all the way out & the rear all the way inward then set the camber @ -.5* & set toe to 1/16 , it will steer far better this way

 

[hpjunke]

Actually there are no specs for a lowered car. Your wandering is because of caster. Unless you replace the upper control arms with longer aftermarket arms you will never get the alignment even close to what you need. Remember that the suspension was engineered to have the caster and camber angles set a certain ride height. Whenever you change the ride height , all of the angles change. The factory can only the engineer the suspension to have a limited amount of adjustment. You will never get a proper alignment as long as the car is lowered. If you insist on keeping the car lower than stock, you have a few options.
Number one, replace the spindles with special made lowering spindles. This lowers the car without cranking the torsion bars down , which just bottoms out the front suspension causing a lousy, hard, unstable ride. The custom spindles lower the car without changing the torsion bar setting or affecting the normal amount of suspension travel that was built into the front end.
Number two, is to replace the upper control arms with tubular aftermarket control arms. There are several companies making them. They are designed to give you more caster and camber adjustment to make the front suspension feel more controlable.

Any time you try to reengineer something on the car, you are just going to cause problems that must also be modified.
The domino effect.

i understand what your saying here however it was just as low before , but it had a some negitive camber something that doesnt matter a whole lot to me .. and it steered just fine didnt pull and drove straight . maybe ill get some upper arms i know that will take care of the ball joint issues and most of the alignment on it but for right now i know i can get it to not wander around..

 

[hpjunke]

max out the caster 3* + if you can get there , turn the front adjusteras all the way out & the rear all the way inward then set the camber @ -.5* & set toe to 1/16 , it will steer far better this way

this sounds more like it .. its not that low if you look at my upper arms , they are angled up just a tad ill give these specs to the guy who did it and see if he cant do it again....

 

[moparleo]

Ask your alignment guy to explain " bump steer" which is instability exagerated when the suspension goes over a rise and fall in the road.

 

[HPP]

max out the caster 3* + if you can get there , turn the front adjusteras all the way out & the rear all the way inward then set the camber @ -.5* & set toe to 1/16 , it will steer far better this way

This is what you want to try to achieve. The orginal specs were design for easy wheeling, floaty steering, with thin bias ply tires. If you are running out of adjustment, you can always put in offset upper contorl arm bushings installed the oposite of the instructions, you can achieve more caster. This solution s about $70 plus a weekedns worth of work. Another alternative is tubular upper arms with the extra adjustment built in to them. This solution runs $300+ deending on your source for arms.

Personally, I'd avoid drop spindles as these produce additional bump steer over stock spindles. Yes, lowering your car makes alignment more tricky. But it can still be done

 

[moparleo]

Alignment specs are easy to say and another thing to accomplish. You can make it better, but fixing it correctly is another thing. Offset upper bushings have been around a long time, and will help. If you really want to get it done right, you will have to spend some money. In the mean time, just put cheap tires up front.

 

[Cranky]

I've lowered lots of Mopars without having alignment issues. Now with 'A' body cars, it's a different story but for the most part, B and E cars don't experience the same issues as those. Has your car ever been wrecked and are all of your front end parts in good shape? And sometimes it's hard to see slight damage to A-arms and lower control arms. If your car has never been wrecked and you still can't get the specs that Chryco Psycho posted, I would start looking real hard at the arms. I ran much more camber than what he mentioned on my 66 Belvedere and the front end on that is the same design on the 73 Challenger and was lowered to within 1" of the lower control arm rubber bumps. Also make sure the upper arms are on the correct side. I've seen it before but I doubt you could even get close to any kind of alignment if they were on the wrong side.

 

[71solo2challenger]

It's common not to get less than 0* camber with a lowered E-body. I have the same problem on my Challenger, and it's not lowered much at all.

E-bodies stock came with Positive caster, and unless you're running a restored bias ply car, there's no real reason to do that anymore with radials. As said before the easiest way to achieve negative camber with positive caster is the offset upper control arm bushings. (never have heard of offset balljoints). Another easy way to get negative camber is to separate the spindle from the steering knuckle and install hardened washers in between.

BTW: Bump steer is toe change during suspension travel. Another common issue. Generally corrected by moving the tie rod pivots (ball joints or heim joints). Typically the outer tie rod needs to be lowered, as it is much easier than raising the inner tie rod.

 

[moparleo]

If you did alignments in the seventies you would know what offset balljoints were. That is how you aligned Chevettes, some Corvettes, Pontiac Fiero's any many more. Common on a lot of GM products. They were bolted in instead of screwed in like our Mopars. Sometimes you also end up redrilling the hole for the idler arm mount. Unless every moving part is in perfect alignment and the tie rods are adjusted equally on both sides, as the car rises or dips the tires will track from side to side as the suspension goes through the bounce and rebound cycle. This can be dangerous at even medium speeds. Don't need caster with radials? Remember these suspensions were designed well before radial tires finally got made correctly so they wouldn't seperate every six months. They were not standard equipment until the mid seventies. When they came standard on the cars from the factory, the suspensions went through several changes including different spring rates because of the flex in the radial sidewalls, toe in was reduced because radials want to go straight, the tolerance on all the ball joints and tie rod ends were tightened up. The shock absorbers were redesigned. That is when gas shocks first hit the market for american cars. Even the rims had to be strengthened because radial tires would cause stress fractures on the wheel centers. Are you old enough to remember " Radial tuned suspensions". The only settings close to zero was toe-in and camber. You need caster for the steering to be stable at high speeds and to retain the steering wheels ability to recenter itself after making a turn instead of just continuing to go in the direction that the wheel was in. Most people nowadays have only experienced rack and pinion steering. No bump steer, no caster or camber changes without special kits. Just thrust angle alignments now which is basically a 4 wheel toe adjustment. 90 percent of the alignment techs out there wouldn't know what to do with aligment shims or how to change the camber and caster at the same time when aligning a conventional rear wheel drive car. They just get the computer to go into the green and they are done.

 

[71solo2challenger]

E-bodies stock came with Positive camber, and unless you're running a restored bias ply car, there's no real reason to do that anymore with radials.

That's what I meant to say.

Sorry, I don't work on GM suspensions so I never had experience with offset Balljoints. The guys in my SCCA class are all Ford Guys. The one Chevy guy that occassionally shows up is an a 4th Gen Camaro. Not many "pro-touring" guys out my way. When I show up with 11" tires up front in my ratty e-body people are puzzled. Or the tape marks where my numbers were.

My front end is being setup right now and to eliminate the bump steer I'm fabbing up a custom centerlink to raise my inner tie rod so I don't need to lower it so far.