This article is part of a section of the RcTek site devoted to radio controlled model car handling. As car handling is an extremely complex subject, it will be quite some time before it is finished.
This article explains only the basics about toe angles and does not go into details of the effects on the handling of your model car. This will be covered in a future article.
The term toe angle refers to the longitudinal angle of the wheels on your model car, i.e. how parallel they are to each other and the car.
The pink arrow in the drawings below denotes the direction of travel of the model car.
The image on the right shows a car with the front wheels Parallel to both each other and to the direction of travel of the car. This is a neutral toe angle position and is the base line measurement from which the other two toe angle positions are measured from.
The front wheels on the car on the right are angled inwards towards themselves and are in what is termed a Toed-in position. This means that the front parts of the wheels are nearer together than the rear parts.
The front wheels on the car on the right are angled outwards, away from each other, in what is termed a Toed-out position. This means that the rear parts of the wheels are nearer together than the front parts.
The images to either side are fairly self explanatory, so if you are in doubt about toe angles, you only need to look at your feet!
The article that covers this will be published in the future.
Toe angles can be set/adjusted on a remote controlled model car by a few different methods depending on the design of the model car. More will be written about this in a future article.
The basic unit of measuring toe angle is the degree, but model cars can be measured using other methods, which will be covered in a separate article.