If you have any anticipation whatsoever of hard cornering or much braking on the verge of ABS intervention, forget that crash bolts even exist. Save those things for the winter beater that you're going to junk in the very near future. While I don't know exactly what Ford then uses for bolts, none of the aftermarket-available pieces are anywhere near as strong or as rigid as the normal OE bolts. And as far as I'm concerned, that's a problem.

Either the Maximum Motorsports caster-camber plates or Steeda HD upper strut mounts are solid choices.

I'd choose the MM plates if I already had new/good upper strut mounts and/or desired caster adjustment capability, Steeda HD upper strut mounts if I didn't.


About the alignment kit . . .
Whether there are any holes specifically for 19" (or larger) wheels does not have to be a deal-breaker. For aligning with larger than 18" wheels, simply move the stand forward of the wheel centerline until the upper and lower contact points register off the same part of the wheel flange (either the face or the raised lip or the outermost point). Move it back of the wheel centerline a similar distance to double-check.

What you're doing is assuming that the wheel outer flange surfaces are in a single flat plane, which you have to assume anyway as your camber measurement with a bent wheel would be off by the amount that the wheel was bent at your measuring locations..

None of the camber gauges that I have built were specifically made to work with anything bigger than 15" wheels. I have had no problem using the above technique for checking the cars that have 17's and 18's.


Norm

 

So I bought a digital angle meter from Harbor Freight and a 19" length of square 1" aluminum tubing. Quickly checked my camber the other night for giggles (car not leveled yet) and it was reading .90 (with +/_ .3 degrees) Figured out how much to place under the rear tires to get the car level to get more accurate measurements. I want to check my toe, but can't decide how. Thought about getting some 3" angle iron to make some toe plates, but wondered how accurate they will bi\e since I would be taking measurements off of the tire rubber. Seen where a guy on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8qFjAB67vk used a string and ruler to measure toe. Can I use this method on a mustang? Thanks.

 

I've always used parallel strings stretched between jackstands and a scale graduated to 0.01". Then measure off the rim flanges. It doesn't matter what kind of car you're measuring, only that you can get the strings up reasonably close to the wheels (around 2" seems to be good enough).

The trick is getting the strings set parallel to each other and close to being parallel to the car centerline. The caution is that it doesn't take a whole lot of wind to move the strings around a little.


Norm

 

You can get accurate readings with toe plates resting on the tire. The key is repeatability. If you measure, then drive around the block and then measure again and get very close results, you are good.