Aligning

[Dodo Bizar]

Now please feel free to make this a general piece of aligning, but here follows my story from this week:

Aligned my EJ9 this week (copy paste from my personal topic). Is about the EJ9. The rear is at minimal toe-in, which due to the lowering is still 22'. Is actually fine for OEM car, but for a more racy setup they advice toe-out instead of toe-in.

Now the front is trickier, since I have 2deg16' camber the inside wears a lot. Especially since the EJ9 is driven a lot in a 'normal' fassion instead of 'racy'.

Now ever since I lowered the car years and years ago it has been aligned by people with some knowledge. So not factory spec toe-in, which is either 0 or 5' (a ' stands for minute which is 1/60 of a degree!) or close to nothing.

My track car has just a bit more total toe-in in the front to make it a bit more over steering and the rear is little toe-out. Somewere in the line of 10 to 20'.

Now my EJ9 has had 35' to 40' toe-in over the last years. Which I believe is quite much. I think due the toe-in at the rear it still is very stable. Tyre wear has always been acceptable and never found a sharper handling car. Well, untill my garage decided to push the tyres a little further. They went up to 1 full degree of toe-in at the front. Immediately the ride was ruined. They re-alligned back to 35' free of charge I need to add immediatly.

The few km I made with 1 full degree were like this: immens torque steer in 1st gear. Okay, we're probably all used to some degree of torque steer. But I found out I usually accelerate at the traffic light without touching the steering wheel the first split seconds. Stupid habit perhaps, but I didn't knew this until my steering wheel started spinning to the right as a mad-man. Funny way to discover torque steer.

Furthermore the car pulled to the right on high speeds, I had to steer a little left to keep straight. And the neutral zone of the car (when releasing the steering wheel while accelerating out of a corner) shifted from neatral plus a bit to somewhere between straight ahead and a lot to the right.

Besides all this, at high speed bumps (highway bumps while doing 120 kmh) the nose had a tendency to jump to the right.

So okay, I talked to my aligner. He hoped he could correct a bit more for the tyre wear by this massive toe-in. The car itself was perfectly symmetric, but the heavier weight on the left overruled and made for the asymetric ride. (Left hand drive plus engine at the left)

So now we have a correctly aligned car again and learned something about the effects toe can have... wow.

[BETEK]

Does anybody know why the ek4 vti have other parameters for suspension aligning from ej9?
Is there something different at suspension parts?

[saxophonias]

As i can see in my autodata cd they share exactly the same specs.

[BETEK]

As i can see in my autodata cd they share exactly the same specs.

Yes I know but when every time I go for aligning the mechanic ask for model type if it is vti, ej9 1.4 etc. And then he selects the type from pc.
Once I asked him if the aligning is different and he said yes.
Now I can remember from Honda service manual that it gives different parameters for aligning each type of civic.
Why this happens, is there more sporty aligning for the vti? Can we use this in our ej9?

[saxophonias]

this is what i am telling you! Ek have the same aligning specs. I just saw it on the english manual too.
Egs have different specs and mb civics too.

[hondaNickx]

I like to know more about this what are great specs to put your EJ9 too ?
How much degree camber ,toe in ,toe out , caster ?...Also people who align their cars themself ?I've seen several alignment kits for sale and they claim to be more accurate then laser alignments in car shops.I love to do this myself .I'm going to replace all rubber bushings from the suspension parts soon.Fresh start with new rubber and a perfect alignment is the target.I'm going to get a good camber kit from SPC front and rear .

[Dodo Bizar]

The only thing I know is for track use you should have a slight toe-in at the front and toe-out at the back to make it more oversteering, gives more control to our understeering cars. In my case the amounts are fractions of a degree.

Normal street use is both front and back a bit toe-in and the front can be at dead zero if you like.

[Law_]

Is that adjustable or do you need a camber kit? Cheers

[saxophonias]

with the large rear swaybar (24mm), understeer has almost disappeared and if you lift off the you have oversteer.
I used to prefer toe out in front for more rapid and sharp turn in and toe in at the rear for more stability.

[Dodo Bizar]

Toe is adjustable, unfortunatly since I lowered the EJ9 with stock LCA's, no toe-out can be attained. Actually the current setting (22 min in) is the limit. After market LCA's are generally shorter to compensate for this reason (~7 mm).

My track car (the EJ1) has those LCA's and therefore can have both negative and positive toe.