Just for grins I bought one of the H/F digital angle finders on sale...Item # 95998 Surprised me!! The thing works great, and appears to be way more accurate than the ace hardware/sears unit..I use them both weekly... Dave
I have a degree...a PHD a matter of fact..( post hole digger)... from the school of hard knocks,,,,,,,,,,,,,but in relationship to degrees you can break each degree down by minutes and seconds,,, if you need to be that close
Keep going. You are thinking right. All you need is a reference point. A plomb bob is good (heavy washer tied to a piece of string or thread) That gives you zero degrees. I make my dragster and such front ends and use long wooden dowels for Kingpins on set up. I use a degree wheel on a large thumb tack referenced agaisnt the thread of the hanging plomb bob. It works well and also gives you a very good feeling for what alignment is all about rather than the mysterious (it must need a computer) feeling many people have. Carry on. You will be fine. Don You can see my long kingpin deal on my website under both the Senior dragster build and the HE-EP build.
yes castor angle in degree,s i think the best way to find castor angle wood bee to use your cam degree wheel under the tire as u need to swing the wheel through a ark of 20degrees 10 left then o and then 10 right so the degree wheel under the tire wood give u that measerment once u have your very handy magnetic degree wheel on the left turn set it to 0 then swing it through to 10 right and whala u will have your castor angle
bought this from lady on the auction site she normally sells odds&ends she had no idea what it was until i told her got it for $20 shipped the toe in setter tool you can make...........
Those magnetic angle finders with the swinging pendulum will get you to about +/- 1/2 degree. You can buy a digital level that will get you accurate to .1 degrees. With either of those angle finders, you'll be measuring whatever you're measuring the angle of in comparison to true vertical (gravity). So make sure your whole chassis is sitting at what you know will be the actual angle the car will sitting at when it's fully loaded and on its wheels. Your measurements will be way off if you have the chassis sitting level and then wind up using big and little tires that actually hold the chassis at some other angle than level.
Whew! I am SO glad somebody got around to pointing that out.... Now, back to those vacuum tubes and cesium wristwatches.......
Well its a dragster frame and setting teh axle and then plan to have teh matching angle on the spring perch,,I really have no way to have the whole driveline in it at this point
Set the rear axle tube centerline at 1/2 the height of the rear tires, and the front of the chassis at whatever height you want it (3" minimum?). That will give you the correct rake. THEN get out the cesium wristwatch... You need the spring angle perpendicular to the radius rods, not really at the same caster angle as the kingpins.
but in astronomy they use arc minutes and arc seconds Artillery, too - Napolean worked his way up the ranks with a protractor in the fieldpiece barrel to check the height against his trajectory table ("where is this going to land if I use 3 bags of powder?").
They refer to a Bachelor's degree as a BS and a Masters degree as an MS. We all know what BS is, so a MS must be More of the Same. If a Doctorate is a PhD, then that must mean Piled Higher and Deeper. I can joke about this stuff as my current employer, was crazy enough to award me a BS in Mechanical Engineering when I was a student here. Don't get me started on degrees and the multiple variations on that as a unit of measure. As an engineer, sometimes I have to solve problems by analyzing the units of measure. And then some "furriner" came up with all of this metric crap and complicated everything.
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