HUB Stands to aid setup

ckiesz

I have and use these ones on a regular basis:

Racing Alignment with Racing Accu-Lign Suspension Alignment System

Hub stands are very helpful when doing alignments and corner balancing, especially in the rear of our cars, where you can make small changes to the toe and camber arms and measure them "live" without having to tighten up everything, lift and resettle the car every single time.

Also the extra height from the stands, scales and leveling pads also get the car up high enough to slide under the car.

Things I've learned to watch out for:

-If you build or buy a set, the thicker the better. Mine are 1" thick aluminum. This became more apparent with more camber, but the stands flex a little top to bottom. so if you measure camber at the hub, it can be different as you go down the stand. Even worse is the toe. you could have a ton of toe at the hub, but if you measure at the bottom, it'll be less or none. The two roller bearings want to roll out equally (imagine lots of camber) so the toe at the bottom will try to be zero. This is why if you look at the hub stands the real race teams use, they are huge and very rigid.

-Scales don't compress perfectly evenly. So if your hub stands roll off to one side, the scales tops will "lean" a tad. Not a huge deal, but it will throw off your corner balance if you are running very high spring rates. I do my alignments on leveling pads with solid "scale replacements" (three layers of decent plywood glued together with a steel sheet on top), and then use the scales for only weighing/balancing.

Otherwise, the hub stands have been a huge help for setting up the cars. Way faster, and easier to get accurate.