Hopefully i will be installing my Eibach's next week but had a question about the alignment. I have a wheel alignment toe gauge and a strut alignment level, will this be enough to correct alignment?

 

after you drop it, I think you will want to have it alligned. I could see it was off quite a bit when I did mine so I got it alligned. $45 for all four wheels is sure better than burning through tires every couple of months. But it's ultimately up to you.

 

Aligning the car yourself will work IF you know how to use the tools you have. Keep in mind that lowering a Protege and/or changing the camber will also change the toe, and the amount of toe change won't always be predictable or linear. Therefore, you MUST have a method of establishing a true centerline of your car so you can correctly set the thrust angle. Adjusting the toe by simply measuring the difference between the front and rear edges of the wheels probably won't cut it.

If I were you, I would take it to a shop. I've done home alignments in my driveway before and found the process so tedious that I'd rather spend $50 and avoid the hassle. FWIW I've found that doing a BAD alignment is easy; doing a GOOD alignment takes some time. Plus, the optical equipment at a shop is more accurate that most inexpensive home-alignment tools, so you KNOW you're getting good results.

 

well, on the 3rd gen pro's the front alignment IS fully adjustable, meaning that caster, camber, and toe can be adjusted. i'm not sure about the other gens, but i assume that it is. as with the majority of macpherson strut suspensions, you can adjust camber and caster by rotating the upper strut mount. so i believe what happen to foxymazda was that when you or who ever lowered your car, you/they put the struts back in so that it created the .8 degree of cross caster. which will make the car pull to the right. and no offense to your mechanic friend, i think he's a toe-setter and thats all. and the factory might make it that way, depending on where it was built because they will try to comp. for road crown, and that varys from location to location due to the local weather. but i seriously doubt it. anyway it IS adjustable and fixable with a little work so your car doesn't have to always pull, and trust me i know what i'm talking about i do alignments at the shop i work at, so i hope that helps a little, and always take it to a shop for alignments...take it easy

 

the 3rd gen's are unibodys. so since you've been in an accident esspecialy since you got sideswiped, i bet your chassis is bent now, which will make your caster go out bad. one way to find out if it is bent, set it up on the alingment rack and look at the s.a.i. it shouldn't be much different, i think the tollerance is .5 degree differance, but if it is more than that you need to take it to a body shop. there's a bunch of other measurements you can look at to find it out, but s.a.i. willl be the biggest. i don't know what alignment machine you are using. i use the hunter dsp 400, and it has tons of "secondary measurements" that it takes so you can see if the chassis is bent out of shape. which is a BIG problem unibodys have after accidents. hope it helps