Honda Civic Si - Poor Man's Alignment

Align It Already
Begin the alignment by adjusting the front toe. If you want zero degrees of toe, simply measure a particular wheel's forward-most and rearward-most points from the string at axle height and ensure they're the same. If they aren't, adjust the tie rod to pull the wheel in or out. Most Honda service manuals include toe specifications measured in inches/millimeters as well as degrees, but if you're looking to set a bit of toe-in or toe-out based on a specific degree value, you'll need to convert that value to inches and adjust your string-to-wheel gap accordingly. The math can get a bit convoluted, but there are several online calculators that'll do it for you; all you've got to do is plug in some variables, like wheel diameter and/or overall tire height and your toe gap measured in inches or degrees, depending on which way you're converting. With the toe set you can move on to camber. Even if you are poor, you should still be able to afford a simple alignment kit like the FASTRAX gauge from SPC. It'll fit most any wheel, measure camber, caster, and toe, and save you from lots of math. But if you just don't want to spend the money, simply attach a two-foot carpenter's level to a metal straight edge, just enough to position the level away from the tire and fender. It's a cheap and effective way to measure camber if your goal is simply to get as close to zero as possible. And since you're poor and are tired of wasting money on tires, zero is a good place to be. However, if you need a bit of negative camber-or any setting that's not zero-you'll need to arbitrarily adjust the camber, position your level at zero, and measure the distance between the level and the top of the rim. Next, you can take this figure and convert it to degrees since camber isn't measured in inches. Again, more trigonometry, but nothing's ever easy when you're trying to be cheap.