front end alignment

[biff]

Hi all. dose anyone know of a good place that can do front end alignments on buses and motorhomes.in the Nashville tn. area.

[Utahclaimjumper]

What type bus do you have in mind??<<<Dan

[biff]

77 MCI-8.

[blue_goose]

You start your alignment at the rear.  If it isn't right no use in doing the front.
Jack

[bevans6]

The thing about an MC-8 (or any of the early MCI's) is that there is only adjustment for toe in the front suspension.  Castor, camber, etc is all in the trailing arms or the axle, and aside from a very large hammer isn't adjustable, nor is the rear axle alignment.  Now, there is one thing about  an MCI that can and did cause issue for me - centering the steering box.  My MCI had a later MC-9 steering box installed, and later a new drag link and cross link.  The cross link was fine, my toe was correct, but the drag link was 1" too long so the steering box was off-center when the bus was trying to drive straight.  The box has a self-centering effect so it was always pulling towards it's center, and pushing the bus off line.  Finding and fixing that was a challenge. Far more so the finding than the fixing.  The finding took months and thousands of miles before I finally got clued in (by an old timer bus nut at one of Kyles non-rallys in South Carolina, I forget the park) who was adamant that you started by centering the steering box, and everything else flowed from that.

[TomC]

Most important is toe. You want 1/16 to 1/8" toe in. You can even measure that. Good Luck, TomC

[luvrbus]

To me the caster is the more important than toe end and buses are limited on caster setting,I don't like fighting the wheel to keep one centered.
I would follow Jack's advice and go for the 3 axle alignment starting with the tags a good shop should have the shims to adjust the tags with 

[bevans6]

On my MCI the rear axle is just a plain 4 link with bushings, but I don't have a tag so I don't know about it.  I had a full computerized alignment done when I was chasing my steering box out of center issue, but aside from finding damage, they said they check it but they can't adjust anything but toe.  They gave me a readout showing everything matched MCI's specs, charged me $125 and sent me on my way.  We did inspect all of the bushings, but they were quite new urethane bushings, and the toe cross bar and drag link were quite new also.  If they had found something off it would probably have scrapped the bus, the only thing that can screw up the chassis is crash damage, basically.

[luvrbus]

The MCI's with a tag axle are a little different than a MCI 5 you need to align the tag they make shims for that

[bevans6]

Clifford, did you get the note I mailed to you?  Any problems?

Brian

[luvrbus]

I got it no problems  thanks