build diary

April 7, 2006: I boogied on down to Scotty's Undercar this morning to put the Seven on the rack.
The technician isn't the chatty sort, trying to preserve syllables for the future. After we'd done a baseline, he asked what kind of car it was. "A Lotus Seven replica", I answered. "I think Steve McQueen had one of these when I was working on his cars" came the reply! Turns out, he used to work near Hollywood in the 60's and would prep McQueen's Porsche for the track on Friday then realign it for the street on Monday morning. How cool is that?

What about my own little car? Well, I'd done a pretty good job in my garage. The camber was fairly well matched up front and the right rear was good. The right rear was toed out slightly though - and the left rear was out even more. Yoiks, no wonder the car was happy going sideways. We tweaked the rear to give a touch of toe in (about 0.03") and matched up the rear camber. Now I have about 1.8 negative in the front (easy to adjust) and 1.9 in the rear. The weird thing was the caster at 12 degrees! I might try to dial some of that out. Overall, though, I'm really looking forward to the track this weekend.

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