After replacing the entire front-end of my 1977 GMC Motorhome I needed to get an alignment. I called around forever before finding a place that would align it. After they had it for two weeks they called back and said they didn't have the tools. Darn. Well, I have a welder and some patience so I opted to just build my own alignment tools. But I wasn't going to dive right into aligning that beast of a vehicle.
So I decided to first try my hand at aligning my Sonett. Note, aligning the Sonett is very straight forward. And you can pay just about any shop to do it. I only did the alignment myself to verify I knew how the use the tools and to try out their design before scaling up to the RV.
The Sonett was already well aligned. I adjusted the toe-in slightly but otherwise nothing was out of spec enough to bother changing. But the tool design worked and gave me the confidence I needed to move on to aligning the RV.
The alignment tool design worked well. The one change I would make, which I can still make, is cutting the lower rail shorter. When you check caster you need to turn the wheel forward 20 degrees, take a reading, then back 20 degrees and take a reading. The alignment tool I made was horizontally very long, great for checking toe-in but unfortuatenly prevented the wheel from turning the full 20 degrees when checking castor. That horizontal bar needs to be shorter to avoid hitting the car body, or lower to just go underneath the body. Going too long is better than too short as I still have the option to cut mine to the right length.
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