Aircooled VW South Africa

Replaced tyres on my "other" car today, did wheel alignment and got to thinking . . . . By who or where do you have your beetle's alignment done? I played around with settings myself some time ago and got the car to feel much better. Is there still someone around that you can trust with rear alignment on a ACVW?

Another topic is wheel alignment settings on performance / dropped etc VW. Anyone got settings they use or can recommend. I can't remember what I aimed for when setting it myself but will have a look and post it later.

In general the only thing you can adjust is the toe-in, which is very easy to do yourself.

Camber and caster adjustments require stripping the front spindles and moving spacers around, which no alignment place will do for you.

I've never had a rear alignment issue on an ACVW except after a collision that bent the rear torsion beam. Beetles have some scope for rear alignment adjustment, but split buses don't, unless you oval out the RGB mounting holes in the spring plates.

Whenever I've replaced a transmission, I've been careful to install it exactly as the previous one sat, which is usually easy as the old ones leaves a mark on the spring plate. It's always worked for me.

I do the wheel alignment myself with one of those old dunlop toe gauges on my race bug.

For the race bug I use:
Front - 30 min toe out, dual caster plates and 3' camber
Rear - Straight, and obviously you cannot set camber on a swing axle (+- 2' static camber)

Had speedy replace my Bay bus's tierod ends in december, and they "atempted" to set the wheel alignment - and made major fckukup of it... they tried 3 times and still it was waving all over the road. Turned out they never bothered to centre the tierods and steering box, and the result was the bus could barely turn left and turn so far right the wheel which is 14" actually scraped on the inside of the wheel arch up front - eish man its not rocket science - so me and a friend ended up centering the box and setting the wheel alignment ourselves at home - after centering the rods & box jacked the bus up so that both front wheels are in the air, stuck a piece of masking tape on each tyre at the same place, drew a line and proceeded to measure inside and outside of the wheel to make sure tow is correct - ended up with less than 2mm tolerance !

The settings I was aiming for is something like this but not possible with our suspension set-ups in SA (Link pin and swing axle).

This is according to a nice article on Aircooled.net "Suspension Tuning Tips for Type 1 Swingaxle Beetles, IRS Beetles and Buggies".

FRONT
* Front –2 degrees negative camber
* At least 3 degrees (preferably 5) positive caster
* 5mm (6/32-7/32”) Toe-out

REAR
* -2 deg negative camber
* 2-3mm (3/32-1/8”) Toe-in

I left out the other suspension modifications mentioned in the article to focus on the settings.

I was unable to do much to the shimming on the king & link pins (as mentioned), and as Louis said the rear camber changes but I had it at -2 static if I remember correctly. There is a mod that the formula V racers used to do to the king pin setup to change camber but I didn't want to go that far. There is also a rose joint modification to the front suspension that I heard from used by Louis and Blitz but as I understand it is quite expensive and doesn't last very long?

I've had the rose joint mod now for + - 8 years. No problem yet. You can also heat up the top suspension arm and bend it to gain camber. (not really the right way)

Louis, do u have any more information on the rosejoint modification? Will it be suitable for a roadcar? Is there a lot of machinework involved?

Thanks