After the long involved posting earlier it seems appropriate to spend a few minutes talking about thrust angle and how it relates to the Flyin’ Miata hub stands. The good folks at Flyin’ Miata used to offer the thrust angle gage pictured below. It was meant to be aligned to the centerline of the vehicle chassis and referenced while measuring toe with the hub stands. They recently discontinued selling it because it was not easy to use accurately. The image on the right shows the FM hub stands “enhanced” to facilitate thrust angle measurements.
Fortunately Carl Schulhof's string method for measuring thrust angle is easily adapted to the FM hub stands. The diagram below shows the details of Carl’s system with the equal length spacers supporting the strings at the “outboard” ends of the wheels and the measurement points in between.
The image here shows Carl’s thrust Angle string setup implemented on the Flyin’ Miata hub stands. The steel ruler at the far left hand side takes the place of one “spacer” while the ruler on the right is the measurement point for the front wheel. The rulers are aligned with the measurement points on the toe bars that we calibrated earlier. We set the string the same distance from the measurement point at all four corners and simply read the numbers on the (measurement point) rulers at the right.
As seen here… reading the strings on the rulers works very well.
All of the elements of this system are fastened directly to the hub stands which makes removal of the system no more complicated that unbolting the hub stands and setting everything aside. Furthermore when the system goes back on the car it stays remarkably well calibrated.
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