Bubb-a-lign

So what you see there is the patent not pending Bubb-A-lign toe in tool.. Yep, 3/4 sch. 40 PVC and a piece of all thread and a nut..

I didn't go full Bubba though, I did use my lathe to square the ends of the PVC and crown the head of the all thread for accuracy.. Then measured it with a tape measure haha.. Anyhow, it worked like a champ and reset the toe on my son's XJ (after a 3" lift) in minutes an with a fair degree of accuracy.. Just think of it as a 54" ID micrometer. I measured from the ground up 12", marked the rim just inside the bead and measured front and back. Adjust and repeat as necessary to get 1/16" smaller in front than back. I was shocked at my initial measurement, how far off it was. Drives great now though! Since this worked so well I'm going to improve this a bit for universal use.

Oh and don't mind the green XJ in the background that appears to be a hovercraft.. I stole the 3" suspension from my 98 for the 99 you see and I am going to put a new 4.5" on the 98..

 

Measure to the inside of the rims, fore and aft.

 

Leave it to me to overthink some $h1t.. Haha.. I dig the foldy stick with the slide on it, never seen one with the slidey part..

 

Your pictures don't show for me, but curious what you came up with.

 

I have 2 3' long pieces of 2" aluminum angle that I keep set aside for this, and usually clamp to the brake rotors/drums and use tape measures like Howard showed.

 

http://earlycj5.com/xf_cj5/index.php?media/10699/

give that a shot..

 

Cool.

In my collection I actually have an alignment measuring tool made of wood - it came from a blacksmith's shop and was used for setting toe-in on horse drawn wagon axles.

 

Funny, I was actually going to the shop to make one from wood when I tripped over the PVC and had the aha moment..

 

Hmmm. Maybe I’m the village idiot then. I made up a device out of crap I had laying around. It’s about a 6x8 plate of maybe 1/2 steel with some like 1/4 rod welded to it. The rod holds an old metal pointer thingy that has a thumb screw on it so I can move it left to right for different size tires.
I make a paint line around the circumference of each tire then set the pointer up against the center of each tire and spin the tire to create a light scribe line to measure at the front and back of the tires.
It seems to work pretty well

 

Just as aside - back in the Dark Ages, I was told that measuring at the front and back was not good enough. The One True Way was to measure a spot on the rim, then roll the vehicle forward a half-turn and measure again at the same point on the rim. This to eliminate variabilities in the tire and/or rim.

A similar tweak was to spin the wheels and scribe a centerline on each tire, measure to that.

 

I can see where that would be "better" but I would venture that most modern wheels don't have enough runout in them to make that necessary. I can certainly see on older stuff that would be a thing.

 

Not so sure. A friend bought new set of wheels, and they were so bad the tire shop refused to put rubber on them.