alignment

[blue68]

My front wheels are sitting crooked now after getting the truck running. I did a 79 I beam swap and put on all new brakes, but now the alignment is way off. The wheels are toed in a lot. From the front they look like this / \ . Those slash marks represent my wheels. Can an alignment shop fix this?

[FORDification]

What other changes did you do? Simply swapping in the disc brake setup or even the entire front-end assembly from a '79 shouldn't have made any differences. Did you use your original springs or those from the '79? Sounds to me like you used the '79 springs, which cause your front-end to sit lower. If the springs have been modified by a previous owner (for example, heated to make them sag, a common redneck lowering procedure) then you'll have the problem your describing.

[blue68]

Yes, the donor was a 1979 F150 Ranger XLT SWB 351M C6, 9". The front end of my truck is no lower now than it was with the heavy 460, the wheels are just toed in. I dont really understand it.

[kid]

New axles or close to new compared to your old axles would possibly show this problem due to an alignment of your old I-Beams. As the springs on the front wear in they sag and sooner or later the axle does this / \. An alignment shop bends the axles with a 60 ton press and chains to produce this | |. When you swap in the newer axle without bringing in the newer springs you would then get / \ from having sagging springs.

For this problem in the days when they were new we at Ford shops would just put in a new spring on the sagging side rather than bend an I-Beam to fit.

My old 68 SWB F-100 Desert toy jumped so much that I ran the junk yards out of spings just to save my Kingpins. It was very expensive in the 80s in SoCal to get Kingpins pressed and reamed. Sagging springs eat Kingpin bushings.