C4 Corvette Alignment

During the past few years I've tried every possible wheel alignment setting on my C4. You have to understand that I try to take a perfectly good Corvette and push it past all the limits. The idea is to take my Corvette and keep going until I really screw things up. Boy, have I done that more than once.

I use the adjustable lower links from Corvette Central.
They camber adjustment really easy

There are two very important things we need from our '84-96 Corvettes. First, we want the car to go down the road in a straight line. Secondly, we want those big expensive tires to last as long as possible. These goals are the same for the street or the track. How we get there however is a whole different situation.

I finally found an alignment setting that was fantastic on the race track. The only problem was that my old white '85 Corvette became undriveable during my morning and afternoon commutes. I fully demonstrated that what is good for the track is not very good at 65 mph, and it's even worse at 40.

Proper alignment is absolutely essential for maximum traction and high-speed performance, not to mention optimum tire wear The one thing that makes all this possible is a quality four-wheel alignment.

You can check your camber at home.
The accuracy is really good.

The only time you should need an alignment is when something causes the wheels to move from the last time you had an alignment. A giant pothole could cause something in your suspension to shift. Also, wear in the steering components could cause all the settings to change. In our case, we just kept screwing with the settings every time we put it on the track, but that's a story for another day.

The problem is that suspension and steering components wear gradually. The aforementioned pothole damage is something you'll notice immediately. Accumulated wear, on the other hand, is something you'll adjust your driving style to. It's not until someone else drives the car that the poor alignment becomes readily apparent.

An annual preventive maintenance alignment will tell you if anything has changed. If it has, some minor adjustments will usually put you back in business. If you wait until you actually feel a change in the steering, or notice a high-speed wander, some serious changes have already taken place, and the repair bill will test the limits of your Visa card.

These are really inexpensive.
They're also easy to read.

There are several ways to decide if an alignment is really necessary. First, check the tread depth of your tires on a regular basis. Uneven tire wear is a dead giveaway that your Corvette needs help. All four tires should wear evenly across the tread. There shouldn't be any difference in the wear on any corner of the Corvette, or across the tread of any given tire. Anytime you notice excessive tire edge wear, beware-you have an alignment problem.

Another dead giveaway is having to steer your Corvette constantly while you drive down the road. Any Corvette, of any year, should go down a straight road without steering input. Steering wander at highway speeds is a definite sign of a problem. It might be because of accumulated chassis wear, but it's a sure sign that your wheels are not pointed in the appropriate direction.

Where Do You Go For An Alignment?

Finding someone to align your Corvette is getting to be a major problem. There are very few people left in the service industry who can align a Corvette properly. I used to train technicians, and only about 10 percent of the people who claim to be alignment specialists have any real knowledge of what they're doing. It takes a certain amount of intelligence, and a lot of experience, to do the job properly. Very few shops can attract and hold this type of service technician.

There's no special type of service center that's better than another. Your Corvette needs an outstanding alignment specialist, whatever type of shop they work in. They might be at a local tire center, or at an independent garage. You might even find one at the local Chevrolet dealership. It isn't that the Corvette is so difficult to align-it's just that most of us are very picky about the way we want our Corvettes to drive.

Homestead

One way to identify a quality shop is to determine the type of equipment that's being used. You don't need the latest wiz-bang equipment to do the job properly; you simply need equipment that's well-maintained.

Alignment equipment is very fussy. It needs to be treated properly. A bad technician will abuse the equipment, and the shop owner, who's tired of paying repair bills, will let the equipment go to pieces. You want to avoid a shop where this is taking place. Remember, a clean organized shop is a good shop.

The newest alignment equipment is designed to do two things. First, it has to be extremely easy to use. Most good technicians work on some sort of commission, and the time it takes to set up and align your Corvette has a direct impact on how much money they make each day. The latest equipment won't let them do a better job on your Corvette; it'll simply let them do it faster. At the end of the week, both the shop owner and the technician will take home more money. There's nothing wrong with that if your car actually gets aligned.

The second point to consider is that the latest equipment is designed to make up for the lack of skill that most alignment specialists bring to the job. The problem is that no amount of sophisticated equipment can make up for a technician who doesn't even understand the difference between caster and camber.

This doesn't mean that you want to visit a shop that has 20-year-old equipment. On the other hand, don't be seduced by the latest CD-ROM alignment machine. Remember, it's still the operator of the machine that makes the actual adjustments.

My favorite piece of equipment not only tells the technician what's wrong, but it tells them which bolt to turn to bring the car into specification. The screen is full-color VGA, which provides a very accurate image. The only problem is that this new technology is too often used as a substitute for training.

Notice the yellow stripes. Once I'm done with the alignment every bolt gets a paint stripe. You can also do this prior to having your car aligned. If nothing was moved after you pick your car up you just paid for a fake alignment.

The best way to find a good alignment shop is to ask around. There are always enough Corvette owners in your neighborhood to ask where they got their car aligned. It's the old "ask the person who owns one" approach. In every community there's at least one good alignment specialist. Your task is to find this individual.

The next item is to make sure that you get a "before" and "after" readout from the computer. This printout is simply a statement claiming that they actually aligned your Corvette the way you specified. Pay special attention to the caster and camber readings.

A lot of production shops will do what's known in the industry as "toe and go." This is simply adjusting only one of the three major alignment settings. A "toe and go" takes only 15 minutes, while a complete alignment might take an hour. There are ways to cheat on the computer to give you different before and after readouts without ever putting a wrench on your Corvette. I won't get into that here. Remember, find a good shop. That's your only protection against consumer fraud.

Some Suggested C4 Corvette Settings

'84-87 Corvettes**