How does everyone here feel about the handling of their trucks with stock alignments? From day one I was pretty underwhelmed with the handling of my F150, when driven hard it would consistently understeer and hop sideways causing me to plow through turns, after 4000 miles I also noticed some very accelerated tread wear on the outside edges of my front tires.

I decided to buy some caster/camber nuts/plates and re-align my truck while ignoring ford's beyond conservative caster and camber settings and using my own. I decided not to go too crazy but even with what I consider to be fairly non-aggressive settings I saw a tremendous difference in how my truck handled, understeer is significantly reduced and don't get anymore skipping or hopping as the front tires loose and regain traction through fast turns. Overall I'm very happy with how this small project turned out and I think it was well worth the $75 investment.

The settings I went with were as follows,
Caster: 4.50*, 4.75*
Camber: -0.70*,-0.70*
Toe: Stock setting

 

Pics god dammit!!! We want pics!!! Lol

 

adding the Hellwig 7705 helped more than anything with my Screw 4x4.

 

Where do you get said caster/camber bolts? Do they bolt into the upper control or lower control arms?

 

I got two of the Moog kits which are re-branded SPC kits, they include new eccentric nuts and plates to go behind them. These kits actually reuse the stock lower control arm bolts which is one of the reasons I choose them, I like the idea of having full size mounting hardware and not the smaller bolts included in most kits.

The part number for the kit I used is K100025 and again you'd need two kits to get full adjustment of the lower control arms.

 

2 kits per side? or 1 per side?

 

1 kit per side

 

I'm not seeing much difference in your specs from OEM, your camber is on the high side of spec and caster is also a little higher.

Alignment is one of my specialties and unless your front end was way out of spec before, there shouldn't be much difference in handling.

What were your settings before you adjusted? Curious more than anything.


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To be honest I'm not sure what it was set to before because I installed the camber/caster kits and then mounted the alignment heads and did the lifted comp, but with everything set very close the where it was from the factory I had roughly 3.8* of caster and -0.15* of camber which is towards the middle of the spec.

I didn't want to start off very aggressive so I went to the high end of the factory spec, but the improvement is still very noticeable. Based on what I felt while driving and the wear on my tires it was clear to me that I needed more static and dynamic camber to keep my tires from rolling onto their shoulders through fast turns.

If I still experience outside shoulder wear over the next few thousand miles I'll bump up the camber to -1.00*, but as of right now I'm happy with the handling improvement I have with my current settings.

 

I just had an alignment done the other day where I asked for as much caster as they could get. I did not get a before/after printout (despite my request for one, but that's for a thread about poor service departments) so I don't know what they numbers were/are.

However, I do know that this has increased straignt-line stability and tracking just as I had hoped it would. I drive a lot of narrow, fairly dangerous backroads that are failing or in serious dis-repair in the north central OK oilpatch. Combine the road conditions with high winds and an immense amount of oilfield truck traffic and things start to get a bit hairy.

By the end of my last hitch out there my truck was going everywhere but where I wanted it to. Now, it's straight as an arrow, even with a moderate cross-wind. Should be heading back out there for work later today or tomorrow, interested to see if this has helped alleviate my white-knuckle experiences on my last trip.