My toe-in gauge, bought last year on eBay. I found one from Slugbus available here on eBay for about $60 shipped. A similar item was sold for a while by Harbor Freight. These used to be made by Manco they were available through Eastman, and were popular in British car circles. The reading on the indicator is the toe in or out. You slide it behind the tires, lift it up, pull it so that the right angle is flush with one tire, slide the indicator against the other tire and adjust it so it reads zero, then flip it around to the front edges of the tires. I bought what’s sometimes called a toe-in gauge: a rigid metal bar with a right angle at one end and a sliding sprung needle indicator at the other. So I looked at other methods that don’t provide the actual edge-to-edge measurements for you to subtract, but instead tell you the difference between the two measurements. Although some swear by these, I was skeptical, since even with a pair of identical new tape measures, my ability to reliably measure within a sixteenth of an inch across a span of five feet using a device that sags in the middle is questionable. Pre-packaged “toe-in plates,” with slots cut into them to hold the supplied tape measures, can be bought online for about $60. There’s another popular do-it-yourself method in which you take a pair of flat, rigid metal plates, lean one of them against each front tire, and use a pair of tape measures on the leading and trailing edges. I tried “the string method” with Louie, and was not successful. But for some reason-lack of attention span, high winds, gravity in my garage, who knows?-the string method didn’t work for me when I tried it on Louie, the ’72 tii, a few years back, when I drove the car afterward, it felt like the two headlights were trying to drive in different directions.
![toe alignment tool toe alignment tool](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/2b/6a/43/2b6a43e6b6487fb7c0cebc7f464db6e4.jpg)
You can find numerous videos on this on YouTube. I first tried the string method: stretching a pair of strings from the rear wheels to the front. It’s replacing steering components, especially tie rods, which have their adjustability built into them via threaded rods, that absolutely requires an alignment afterward.Īfter such work, I used to dutifully haul my cars in to whatever auto repair chain had a discount coupon for alignment. However, a number of years ago, I began doing front-end alignments myself. By the book, that’s largely true, but in my experience, replacing front-suspension components like struts and control arms with identical replacement parts doesn’t materially affect alignment. It’s usually said that if you do any front-end work on a car, the car is going to need to be re-aligned.