Saturday, February 28, 2015

Wheels Professionally Aligned

Objective:

Today the car got the wheels properly aligned. Called a tow truck to take the car to the shop. Drove from my garage spot to the street again to load the car on the truck.

The time spent on the car shop was mostly talking with the mechanics there, answering their questions, as this is not a common sight. The fact that I built it and I'm not a mechanic and did not study anything mechanic-related made it even more of a sensation.

In the end, these were the final values the car got. The "factory defaults" are for some randomly selected car since the machine HAD to have a brand and model selected to work (and did not know of locosts, caterhams nor the likes):
In English, "Sopé" means "Camber", "Avanço" is "Caster" and "Convergência" is "Toe In". I don't know how good these values really are. My gut feeling would have tried to match camber left and right a bit more and have less toe in on the rear. But the mechanic said the camber difference was almost nothing and this was a good setup. The track will tell!

In the process, received an improvement idea regarding the rear uprights: to replace the rod with a bolt in each end with a rod with a welded of cast bolt on one end. Idea is that, with usage, if the bolt near the toe alignment seizes, it will be a lot easier to loosen it.

Also got a contact of a company that does Porshe 356 replicas here and may know about legalisation and converting painlessly an UK registration into a Portuguese one.

The tow truck took me home and I did not have time to test or mess more with the car.

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