I visited a friend Friday and in the coarse of conversation he mentioned that a local alignment shopped finally cured the shimmy problem on his straight axled '32 by toeing it out rather than in, supposedly an IH truck cure. Has anyone else heard or done this? how much and why does it work?
yes, I'd heard of it although I wasn't experiencing shimmy I tried it just to see what would happen I went as far as 1/8" out without aparent ill effects but put it back to 1/8" in because that's what seemed to work best
I've heard that toeing out will inhance handling and stability but at a very small amount of up to 1/8 or so. The only bad thing could be early tire wear as faar as I know
your tires will scrub, car will go strait and will apear to handle like on rails but tires will chew themselves up. ran a bit toed out to austin last year from long beach and wore tires out in 3000mi on a 32roadster pickup. did not do it on purpose, just read my tape wrong. we all make mistakes and mine cost me tires. 1/8 toe in is the magic number. toe out is not the cure, its just covering up some other reason the vehicle shimmys.
your shimmy was coming from the tires wearing and fighting the pavement to run true.he did the right thing. toe in,toe out,castor ,camber..all are alignment points
Yes, toe out will help reduce a car from 'darting'. I help out on a 'Tour Modified' and we set the front toe at about 1/8" out. I guess the idea is that it keeps a slight tension on the wheels pulling them apart slightly. I don't think that 1/8" in or out should have any noticable effects on wear. Much more than that in either direction could definately cause excessive wear/feathering of the treads. Many front wheel drive cars are set this way also, but because on acceleration they try to pull themselves straight. A whole different set up.
You're safe running 1/8" or so of toe out. The shimmy is another problem altogether - can be steering linkage stiffness, castor/trail, too much offset on the wheels, etc. Would at least give the steering a good once-over just for peace of mind.
Out is better than in, a car with excessive toe-in is a handful. Bias ply tires like a little toe-in, they tend to straighten out as the vehicle rolls, but the most I've ever done was an 1/8". Radials I set straight up with zero toe. I agree that the toe-out you describe is a crutch and covering up an underlying problem somewhere else. Bob
I used to run street stocks and bomber cars, we went with around a 1/4" toe-out. Once the front tires were scuffed in and everything else was in the ballpark, the car handled well. Bob
I reset the toe on the 53 Studebaker Bonneville car before the first run this last August to 1/8 inch toe in. The first pass, it was ill handling and Hooley shut it down at about 160 MPH for another reason. We checked our original specifications and it had been set at .080 out originally. This was the opposite of what I thought should work. We reset the toe to out .080 and the car went straight at better than 250 mph. It has a Mustang II type front suspension with a rack mounted in front. I did not think that it would work but it did. So, I think it would not hurt to try this and if there is no change, you could go back to the toe in setting. John
In my experience toe out will feather the treads on the outside.I think it depends on which side of the axle your steering is on whether you can get away with toe out.Also toe out will have a tendency to grab every line in the road,making it like your coraling it down the road.We had a prob with a straight axle shimmy and cured it with a shock on the linkage,anyway good luck.
I think everyone here is right. Point is, every car is different. From tires, engine, total weight, steering box, etc, etc... Sometimes you have to play around til you're happy with it, to hell if that isn't where the spec is or where someone else thinks it should be!
Both cases are not good if they're really out. Toe-in is worse from my experiences with it, you really have to fight the car to drive it. It does ridiculous things, toe-out will at least be drivable once the tires take a scuff. Bob
Toe out is ok if your running a race car.. Of course thats a whole new ball game... A properly set up front end should work with 1/8 toe in and 5 to 7 degrees of caster and i prefer the 7.. if you have a wobble check everything including the castle nuts. I had one brake kit that when i backed the nut off one castellation it was really loose cause of the wide spacing.. That created a wobble. I now take extra time and make sure they are right. A little tip here ... King pin shims can be your friend.. They work well taking up the little extra you need to sht the spindle nuts right.. In reality the brakes should have some pressure on the rotors and help with any shimmy but this was before id even heard of residual valves or any of that shit .. Dave
Had an Amphicar once. It didn't drive for crap on the road, tried Toe-out/helped some on the road and even more in the water! Tom
My experience from circle track cars; Front steer = toe out Rear steer = toe in Used to know why, but don't remember right this minute. Going in a straight line the tires aren't going to scrub any different one way or the other. Tire wear issues stem from what the toe does through bump travel and turning.
The prob with all this is the man will wear tires if too much toe-in or toe-out.A ballpark figure is an 1/8 toe in and all thats doing is adjusting for the natural slop of the linkage.When you go down the road the front of the tires open up to zero toe,hopfully.We still don't know what his caster reading is but as one guy said about 7 degrees pos. sounds about right.Like a dragster or a road grader the more pos.the straighter it will go and harder to turn.This shouldn't be too difficult to fix with all the info.
I agree. If you get the thrust angle square and positive caster of 6° or so, 1/16-1/8 toe in will be very stable. Going down the road it zeros out on toe anyway if its in. Out it doesn't unless its front steer like a van, then I have set them to zero and they likely toeout on their own a little. Radials don't need as much as bias tires, but I would rather get some positive caster in and toe it in just what it needs. It isn't quite as bad about feathering the tires. Front drive cars can be zero too like on a front steer rear drive because of the torque. Too much toe in can make them squirrely on wet roads when the tires get hard.
I used to set my brother's open-wheel circle tracker to 1/8 toe out to cure a loose condition. It worked great, experimentation is sometimes the only way to learn.
Pick up any shop manual or Motors Repair Manual. In the front end specs there will be a column with the title....TOE-IN SETTING. Unlike caster and camber there is no positive or negative numbers to indicate which side of zero that the spec is used. It's toe-IN. It will range from 0 to usually 1/8". There is no need to specify in or out because from the 20s on through the 2000s front tires and rear tires, that can be adjusted, have specs for toe-IN. I know very little about roundy round racing set ups. If you drive your car in that setting then go for it but if you drive on city streets and highways, set the toe-in to factory specs. I used to have to buy front end spec books for reference when doing Maryland state inspections. Of all the manufacturers with all their engineers going back over 70 years none of them figured out that toe out would be an improvement over toe in. I don't think I'm smarter than them. Call me a Lemming but my street driven front wheels and rear wheels (if adjustable) will be toed in to what the factory engineers figured out would provide the best handling and tire wear.
The rolling resistance and the give in the various ball joints will use up most of the 1/8 inch toe-in. The toe-out will give good tire wear when you are backing. Neal
I have to disagree with the first part. For Maryland state inspection I had a "scuff gauge" When you drove onto the 1" thick scuff gauge it measured the toe in by sliding left or right on ball bearings. The needle indicator would show how much the tire was "scuffing" as it rolls straight down the road. This is normal and needed. I have inspected cars that were incorrectly adjusted for toe-out. The owner had to get that corrected before it passed inspection. The whole point of toe-in is to provide a little scuff of the front tires. Setting it to the correct specs won't cause excessive tire wear. If the front end parts allow the toe-in to change after it is adjusted to spec then those worn parts need to be replaced. IMHO. Yes I know toe-in is set on a perfectly level surface with the tires perfectly centered which is not so common on the real roads but that is where we have to start.
Front steer = steering linkage is in the front of the axle ...rear the opposite. Toe out on front steer pulls all of the slop (wear) in the tie rods apart and is more repeatable than being compressed the way toe in would. Toe out works on road racers and roundy cars because the outside front tire in a turn is the "Master" tire and has a larger contact patch than the lighter loaded other front tire. It controls the way the car turns. Therefore toe in leads to a small darting action when the weight shifts to the front during turns..(you suddenly get a little extra turn in than you had not planned)..toe out leads to a gentle turning in effect where the driver keeps adding wheel input until the car is on the desired line. Again, 1/8" toe in will not wear tires any more than 1/8" toe out....unless linkage wear enters the picture, then one or the other will appear to wear tires more. sorry to be so wordy.....MIZ
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