Yes, you should. But you can also put something that has equivalent weight in the drivers seat. So if you weigh 150 lbs, you can put 150 lbs worth of free weights on the driver's seat. Either or will work, but the later is probably the easier unless someone else is doing the weighing.

You also need to disconnect the sway bars before corner balancing.

Could you explain how the sway bars mess with the readings, please?

If the sway bars have any preload on them, it can affect the corner balance.



Good info I found on a Porsche forum.

A corner balance will adjust the height of each corner to shift weight so that the sum of the opposite corners will add up to an approximately equal value. This is fine tuning after the correct ride height is set. Adjustable sway bars will allow you to make the resistance to R/L body tilt increase or decrease, which can be used to increase or decrease oversteer or understeer. Adjustable drop links allow elimination of "pre-load" on the sway bars. I have never had a problem with preload on a car that was correctly corner balanced, but my 993 was relatively symmetrical, I guess. It is not necessary, as far as I know, to have adjustable drop links to correctly corner balance a car. And, with adjustable sway bars, theoretically you could dial out preload with the placement of the drop link to the correct hole on the sway bar.

I didn't see this mentioned anywhere in this thread, but the scales need to be leveled relative to each other before you start taking readings. Most nice scales will have adjustable feet.

If youre poor and have a legal car, you can always hit up highway patrol to get it weighed like youre talking. HP in my area has trucks that go after commercial vehicles. We have analog scales out here but its better than nothing right?

I don't think highway patrol would have separate weights for each tire, would they? Yes, you could get the overall weight of the car, but you need to have the weights at each corner.

Well this thread has been around for a while. it needs some updating.

Here is how I corner weight:
(forgot to put this in there but check tire pressure, make them all equal)
1) Adjust coil-overs to the customers desired ride height.
2) I only disconnect the sway bar if it has adjustable end links.
3) Set car on scales as if it were ready for the driver to race.
4) Record the corner weights.
5) lift car up, change the ride height at each corner little by little until the car has a 50% cross weight balance. 50% cross weight is achieved by getting 2 adjacent corners to equal half the total weight of the car.

Sometimes (and when I say sometimes I mean most of the time) I have to make changes to the ride height, record weights, make more changes, record weights, and so on several times. Hopefully you can change the ride height at each corner without taking the wheels off every time but in some cases you do.

6) After 50% cross weight is achieved, then you do an Alignment.





This is with the driver in the car. Its a fully gutted race only Honda civic.