Tire and Wheel Alignments Are Important

Tire and Wheel Alignments Are Important

By Tom Fornshell, Service Manager

Hewlett Volkswagen is currently offering free wheel alignment checks on the service drive!

If you have never had your alignment checked or if you just bought new tires from a discount tire store, you should have this service performed. (Chances are, that discount store doesn’t check or even perform alignments.)

Safety First!

We don’t say “Safety third”…we say “Safety first”. There isn’t anything much more important than your safety and the safety of those around you. Lights, brakes, tires, and windshield wipers are the big four safety items on your car. Most all Volkswagens will tell you if you have a light burned our (except reverse lights.) We ask almost every time we see you if you have replaced your wipers in the last year, and we measure your brake pads every time we have your tires off.  It’s all about safety.  I only remember I need new wipers when I find myself in a Texas rain storm on IH-35 at night and I can’t see anything out of my windshield, or worse yet, when my wife tells me that same thing happened to her.

Tires are the only thing connecting your car to the road. Wheel alignments help keep your tires from wearing out too fast and from wearing in a dangerous pattern. Badly worn or worn-out tires are dangerous. They can cause poor traction or worst of all, blow out on the highway (think Ford Explorer recall 15 years ago.) Most folks think they need an alignment when their car is pulling to one side or the other when, in fact, alignments almost never cause a pull. There. I said it. Alignments don’t cause a pull, radial tires do. I’ll mention more about this later in the nerd section.

Alignments are not only important for proper tire wear, but also a lot of the modern safety features like automatic cruise control that keeps a safe distance from the car in front of you, to blind spot monitoring, to autonomous breaking systems, to lane departure automatic steering systems; all require calibration to your vehicle’s alignment. Without proper calibration, many of these systems may not function properly.

Alignment 101

Nerd alert… skip this section if tech stuff bores you.

Alignments are the process of adjusting your wheels to all perform well together on a single plane. Since your entire car is mounted to its suspension system on squishy rubber mounts (for your comfort) car manufacturers have developed a specification range for each adjustment. Your wheels will move through the rubber mounting’s range of motions while driving. Any reading within that somewhat narrow specified range is considered properly aligned. Rear axles have two adjustment axis: toe and camber.  Front axles have three: toe, camber and caster.

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  Toe is how straight the tires run down the road. Almost all passenger cars have a little toe-in (think pigeon-toed.) This is done to provide some stability in lane position going down the road. Too much toe-in and the tires wear out quickly, usually on the outside edge.  Too little toe-in or toe-out causes an unstable condition and you have to constantly move the steering wheel to keep your car in its lane. Race cars are set up with toe-out for different reasons, but those people are always moving the steering wheel anyway.

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      Camber is the tilt or lean of the tire towards or away from the middle of the car. Since your tire moves up and down in an arch, this adjustment finds the optimal balance of traction needed on a loaded suspension arm arch to proper road contact throughout the suspension travel all while in consideration of tire wear.

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          Caster is how far in front of the axle the suspension positions the wheels. This is done to help bring the steering wheel back to center after turning. More caster brings it back faster or with more force.  Remember when I said alignments almost never cause a pull? This is the one adjustment that can. With a large differential between the caster adjustments from one side to the other (cross-caster) the car can pull to one side. But, 98 percent of the time it is the tires causing the pull. I began this section with nerd alert, but trust me, for simplicity and brevity reasons, I made some sweeping generalizations that will no doubt cause my inbox to overflow, but I really am trying to be informative and pithy. One more disclaimer: a bad alignment can cause a crappy wear pattern in your tire and that tire will then cause a pull, but correcting the alignment will not remove the wear pattern, nor its resultant radial tire pull.

End of nerd alert!

 

A proper 4-wheel alignment starts with the back axle. We will adjust camber and toe angle on the rear with a goal of a zero-thrust angle. That is the most important thing in the back… zero-thrust angle. Then we will adjust caster, camber and finally toe on the front. The front axle and steering wheel are adjusted to the reference of the rear axle thrust angle. Each wheel is adjusted individually and sometimes several times. We may adjust a wheel on a Touareg more than a dozen times each because each adjustment effects the other. It can be maddening and take hours.

Once all this is done, and if the axles have been moved, the uber-modern safety systems need to be recalibrated and that can also add hours and expense to an alignment.

If you haven’t had your car aligned in a few years, at least have it checked for free to know if it needs
to be adjusted, or you can wait for your tires to tell us, but that is the expensive way to find out you need an alignment.

Remember, come by for a no cost alignment check if for nothing else for peace of mind.

As always, happy motoring and safe travels.

Tom Fornshell

Service Manager

Hewlett Volkswagen