I'm looking for an alignment shop that will do an alignment without lifting the vehicle, or one that will settle the vehicle on the lift. The suspension needs to be fully settled to ride height in order to get a good alignment due to poor suspension Geometry of a 1970s FWD car (Suspension is from a Toronado). It is torsion bar suspended with lots of tire scrub so there is plenty of binding.
Ideally it'd have 2-4 degrees of caster and around 1 degree of negative camber (factory specification is zero). I'd like about 1/8" toe but factory spec is zero.
I don't have a large flat concrete patch to do it.
I've already burned up one set of front tires (may be related to black stripes on the asphalt?) so now that it ate a set of wheel bearings it's time for an alignment and hopefully I can get more than 2000 miles out of a pair of front tires.
So Clyde's doesn't want to deal with it, unless magically front-end alignments are $500 now. $500 seems a bit steep for an hour's worth of work but whatever.
It's actually fairly modern inside but nothing exciting. It's walnut and gray tweed and gray carpet. Probably be getting rid of the carpet for some kind of wood flooring. The bathroom is the most dated as the shower is original. I haven't dealt with the dash either, not sure I'm going to anytime soon. The seats are 12 way power out of a 2004 Escalade. I bought two sets and took out the memory module of the driver and swapped the passenger harness to the driver and rewired it. Essentially eliminating the most common failure point which is the memory module. Mostly did this so it had nice cushy seats and actually has shoulder belts now.
Cadillac 500 bored .040" over with full roller and fully ARP studded. Cam is a little bit on the wild side (custom Howard's grind) so it only pulls 14" of vacuum at 975rpm. It has a Fitech on it which between that and the Edelbrock intake causes the engine to stick up 7" above what used to be a flat floor. It runs pretty good through 1 7/8" primaries out through some Borla passthroughs. Sounds kind of like a racecar.
Eliminated the engine driven AC and built up bracketry to run a Leece Neville 240amp 160mm rotor alternator. The alternator powers an inverter that runs the rooftop AC. There is also a kustom setup running a Briggs P2200 generator that will run the rooftop AC when boondocking.
Leaves mean black stripes on the road. Burned up one pair (Michelin LTX) in like 2200 miles. Trying a harder compound this time.
It now has 80mm calipers with D614 pads on all 6 tires now so it stops like it goes.
Pretty much everything has been touched except the shower stall. Still some more work to go like putting the body moulding on and putting real shades on it. And the flooring. Someday I'll probably modernize the dash. I'm kind of burned out on it now. Roughly 1700 hours into it in the last two years.
I'll see what they say. I'm almost at the point of trying to do it myself in the elementary school parking lot (they have big chunks of flat concrete).
It may go 104mph according to the GPS. Above 90 it might get a little white knuckle. It may cruise nice at 77. I'd like to see what it'd really do but I don't think the popo would let me off with a warning going triple digits in a 10,000lb racecar with plumbing. It's not like you can blend into traffic.
Before I painted it I felt like I could get away with it more because most people would just stare in horror. You could tell some felt bad for you, in a Cousin Eddie kind of way. Like you're rolling up with just loud enough to notice exhaust and someone expects to see a classic car and instead sees a multicolor 70s motorhome with a goofy fscker sitting in the driver's seat. I actually saw a couple kids run away in fear once, my wife laughed so hard I thought she was going to pass out. When going through some neighborhoods, before I put a resonator on it, people would give me the "slow down" signal and it was going a solid 19mph just off idle. It's pretty much silent inside because I covered it in Dynamat Xtreme and Dynamat hoodliner.
The worst part about it is that everyone wants to pass you. It's impossible to see around so most people hate following it but I'm always going expediently on the road. So they tailgate you in areas that they *really* shouldn't even be going as fast as I am. And then they pass you and you're relieved and then they slow down to less than they were going when following you. They *never* expect you to pass them back.
