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Ailignment weighs in?

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jsfbond

jsfbond

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I have a customer in Spofford, New Hampshire that requested some bags of Black Beauty (or sand blast) to put into a BMW (specifically in the seats and trunk)so that the car is weighted for alignment. In New England? If this car was being raced, and you are looking to gain a tenth of a second, I could see the attention to this detail. Over the road (in New England) is this really an option worth considering? The first pothole you hit is going to take something out of the adjustments!
 
jsfbond said:
I have a customer in Spofford, New Hampshire that requested some bags of Black Beauty (or sand blast) to put into a BMW (specifically in the seats and trunk)so that the car is weighted for alignment. In New England? If this car was being raced, and you are looking to gain a tenth of a second, I could see the attention to this detail. Over the road (in New England) is this really an option worth considering? The first pothole you hit is going to take something out of the adjustments!
Click to expand...

Is he paying? cause if he is that would be your answer.
grin.gif
 
BMW Mercedes,Lexus and Audi, and I'm sure many others, specify weights in the seats and trunk before aligning the vehicle. (Mercedes wants the ride height measured as well)
They provide a "load" chart along with the specs. Probably the shop he's using came across that requirement and he was told to come up with the weights before they would align it.
Those manufacturers don't give loaded and unloaded specs. They expect you to follow their instructions. Setting the car up to the specs given,without loading it, will will throw it off a bit.
In reality it's probably not enough to make a difference.
 
Okay we've tossed it around, can you align an unloaded car to loaded specs (say 200 lbs in the drivers seat) and have it come out right?
 
Jaguars, (Series 1,2, and 3 XJ6, and XJS and XJ40s at least) have specific alignment tools that you fit to the suspension to hold the car at the correct ride height. If you don't use these, and align the car, it will not be correct. When I was at Jag Dealer mechanic school years ago, we aligned a car at the "resting" height, and then installed the tools. The alignment was way off. I see a lot of these cars that have worn out inner edges of the tires...I had a friend make my set from the specs in the manual, and have since found a partial set of factory ones on Ebay. After you have the tools, the tough part is getting an alignment shop to use them.... Most are resistant to the idea.

Fiat 124 spiders want you to align the car with 2 people in it. Which two people?? I am a big guy, so me and a 98 pounder would give some weird results... Maybe I need a couple of folks from the embassy...
 
Simple answer to the above question is, no. the specs will be out if the loading instructions are not followed. Will they be out that far? It depends... But the thing is, most modern computer alignment machines will automatically bring up the chart showing how much weight to place where. A shop that does alignments with any kind of regularity on European cars should have weights handy (Our Toyota dealer has several canvas bags of shot in 30 lb increments.) and it's not a big issue to load the car to spec. Our Hunter machine even had the reflectors to automatically measure ride height on Mercedes, even though we rarely ever saw them.
 
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