A thought about production line tolerances: perhaps it has as much to do with the plant that assembled the unibody? Maybe some had jigs that allowed more performance oriented alignments?
And my thoughts on alignment specs here: for street driving, caster is far more important than camber. The reality is that youre more likely to notice the self centering afforded by caster than the extra grip from the camber. Racing is a different story, especially autocross.
To those that have a hard time achieving caster, is the rear ride height boosted over stock? Changing the angle of the car will affect caster, a lower rear ride height will improve caster.
Has anyone ever done away with the cams and lengthened the slots to allow more adjustment? The cams are strictly to ease adjustment, once the bolts are torqued they dont do squat.
Great questions. I agree that caster is the main goal for a mild street type car. The problem that I am learning is that gaining caster means also gaining positive camber. I am still curious about some possible fixes. The owner called me to say while the rear cam bolts are maxxed out to the inside, the front ones appear to be near the middle of their adjustment range. When I had the car here, I had the fronts cranked to the outside and the camber was WAAAAY positive. This has me wondering if those spacer washers from Mancini would be a way to reduce the excessive positive camber. (In effect, resulting in less than the 2 degrees of NEG camber that they are advertised to provide)
The same alignment shop had trouble aligning my FrankenDuster in 2011. I had these same bushings in that car, installed the same way. I chalked it up to a shop being NON Mopar friendly or possibly just unwilling to work on an old car. The Duster was also "Baseline/Bonehead" aligned by me with the front cams out and the rear cams in. It tracked and steered great with no abnormal tire wear.
