Ill throw in my 3 cents here.
Someone who does alignments professionally, is held accountable for that alignment. In the shop, the best way to cover your butt is put it in factory spec. You can ask for a custom alignment but, you better know what you want. The best guys to do custom work are ones who mod or race your particular vehicle type. They (hopefully) will know how to maximize the alignment angles to your build. All of this is assuming they can properly adjust your suspension after you mod it. Some lift's cannot be properly adjusted if at all, other than toe.
I have always had access to an alignment machine and have played with different cars over the years. The customers got stock alignments, my friends and I got custom. In a shop, custom means more liability. A lifetime of that and the tech only knows stock. The other issue is, who trained him. Most guys are given a quick once over on the machine and now they do alignments. They don't even understand angles.
In the field there's a term, its called "toe and go". Check the front toe and ship it. It takes me quite a bit to do an alignment. Test drive, check suspension for wear, measure everything, align, test drive.
You get about 1 hour to do all this. You go to work to make money. This is only a money maker if you find worn out parts. Same thing with $19.95 oil change. Most techs are taught to check toe and ship. 20 years later this is all they know or want to do.
15 years ago I retired and started teaching. Alignment is one of the things I teach. My students would bring in everything from mom's car to their custom whatever. You would be surprised how many guys I had who were already working, were never taught correctly. Some of these vehicles were aligned incomplete or incorrectly by professionals before the student brought it in.
Why is this? Because the guy who taught them was never taught correctly. Same with who taught him. Not properly trained, bad habits due to the need to get it done and this is who trained the guy you want to do custom work.
When it comes to custom anything, you need to know everything about what your doing or have access to people who have the same thing you do with the info. On alignments there is no one size fits all perfect combo. You can optimize but if you want precision, you need to do math. Most of our vehicles, we just need to optimize for tire wear (street) and those numbers are stock numbers. Our issue's are more related to caster than anything. You should back off caster when you go bigger tires. But you can go too far and cause instability. As long as you only went a couple of tire sizes bigger, its not real important. The issue here is though, unless you modify your suspension, it's not adjustable on most vehicles.
I'm sorry if this sounds like a rant. As a tech who went to school for it and eventually finished my degree, It saddens me to have worked with or met so many people who should not be professionally working on car's (don't even get me started on brakes).
I have though worked with many real good techs. The most knowledgeable are the ones who race. They know how to set their vehicle up correctly using custom parts. Everyone else were just good techs as long as you don't talk custom.
Scott
