So either my eyeball is super calibrated or I got really lucky when I tightened up the lower ball joint bolts because I checked camber and toe today and they are all within spec as far as I can see. e
dit: see OOPS below missed a decimal point.
I was inspired by this web page:
Do It Yourself Alignment Tips
Checking camber was easy, and it came out to within spec even tho one site was slightly more tilted than the other I am going with that is the slant of my garage floor. I measured 5mm at the top of the two 48" levels on the passenger side and 15mm on the drivers side. Being parked on the left side of a well laid two car garage floor I am guessing there could be a cm difference from one side of the car to the other. Will measure one day, but not today.
For the toe I ditched the whole "find the center line of the car and hang some string" method and came up with this instead:
My diagram says that it doesn't matter how wide your car is just subtract the distance between the front outer edges of the rims from the distance between the back outer edges of the rims and divide by two and you will get the opposite side of a right triangle where the hypotenuse is the face of the wheel and the adjacent side is an imaginary straight line parallel with the center line of the car. Greater simplicity makes for greater accuracy!
In order to make the triangles bigger and easier to measure, install 66" rims, or use a 48" straight edge on your 15" rims like this:
Make marks on the floor on the other side as well. Notice I made the marks on the outside of the straight edge some distance from the face of the rim. Like I said it doesn't matter how wide your car is, as long as you use the same method all the way around you will end up with two right triangles.
After measuring the front marks and the back marks and subtracting and dividing by two...
I found the opposite side of the right triangles = 12.5mm
I found the hypotenuse by subtracting 15" from 48" x2 = 66" = 1676mm
SOHCAHTOA
toe angle = sine (opposite/hypotenuse)
toe angle = sine (12.5/1676) = .427 degrees toe
OOPS!!!!! I was off by a factor of 10 in my calculations because I should have been aiming for .08 deg max toe in but I had read it as .8 deg. So I need to be within 4.7mm over 66", not 47mm. DOH!!! Oh well, will have to adjust the tie rod after all.
On a side note:
I used an OpenOffice spread sheet to do the trigonometry and I double checked with my scientific calculator which quickly showed me that OpenOffice was giving the answers in radians instead of degrees. Since there was no radio button for "degrees", I had to multiply by 180/pi! LOL! Anyway...