Overview of Car Frame Alignment

Series Summary

Frame straightening is a key factor in keeping your car running and looking good. If your frame alignment is off, your tires will not wear properly and your car may steer or corner in unpredictable ways. As for the appearance, poor alignment may create gaps in what are intended to be seamless connections between parts, such as door jambs and the seals matching your hood and trunk with the main body of the car. Bad alignment might even cause the car to learn to one side. This problem is especially apparent with older restoration jobs, which may look great, but may have been done at a time when proper frame alignment technology was not yet available.

In this free series of car repair videos, our body shop professional will give you an overview of frame alignment and tell you why it is important for your car. He demonstrates every step of the alignment process, from the positioning on the ramp, to jacking up your car, to removing the parts (such as the seat molding) necessary to align your frame. You will learn how to measure your fender height and then measure the undercarriage of your car to determine what the alignment measurements should be. So watch these excellent and informative videos from Expert Village to make your ride smoother and safer as well.

Video Transcript

"DOUG JENKINS: Hi, I'm Doug. I work with twenty great guys in St. Louis at Doug Jenkins Custom Hot Rods, and we're going to do some work for you today on Expert Village. Now we're going to work on frame straightening, adjusting, measuring on this '32 Packard. It has a couple of issues with it that I'll show you that had us concerned, so we'll start with measuring the frame. If the frame is straight then we can go about adjusting things in other way, but you can't really build on anything if you have a crooked frame. One thing you can notice on this car if you look, it's leaning slightly to the right. It's probably--oh, as much as half an inch down on the right fender from the left fender. And this is what drew our attention to the problem in the first place, is this right side door gap. Now this nice, old Packard has a lot of wood in it. it has new wooden floors, and also, there's probably of number of factors that could be contributing to the fact the door is tight at the top and wide at the bottom. There's also a couple of issues here as we wander around the car, we always want to take a careful look at the hood gaps, front and rear. A lot of this stuff can be adjustable. The way the radiator grill shell fits, you know, it's tight here at the bottom and it's loose here at the top. That could be as simple as just--moving the radiator around, but we're going to start with a straight frame. A lot of good old restorations like this were done by real good guys, they're real craftsmen, but they didn't have the equipment or the ability to get a frame straight."