rev up your engines, today I can help you answer the question, does my car need a
front and alignment, now to understand front-end alignments, I'll give you a little
history lesson, long before cars, people run around in wagons and horses pulled
they just had a hub axle, a wooden wheel would fit over it, sometimes they had
metal inners with bearings, it would just spin and be pulled down the road,
they had rudimentary braking systems and suspension systems, but they didn't have
any adjustments to a line of wheels, they were just on an axle and they spun
straight, but cars of course are different, they go relatively fast 60 - 70
miles an hour can be a cruising speed, and the front wheels have to be aligned
so the vehicle goes straight and doesn't waver to one side or the other, but as
nutty as it sounds, that doesn't mean the wheels are turned perfectly straight, if
both wheels were going perfectly straight, the car would squeal when you
cornered and a front-wheel drive car would pull one way or another, there's
various adjustments that have to be made to make it track correctly, I'll take this
wheel off to show you, here the tie rod has a nut and a threaded rod, so it can
be adjusted to make the wheel point in or out as need be, but unfortunately
they're making cars cheaper than used to, when I was a young mechanic in the
sixties, cars had much more adjustments to compensate for wear or damage, these
bolts here used to have adjustable slots so you could move it in and out that way
and when you go to the top of the inside, these used to have adjustable slots in
it too, so you can make all kinds of adjustments which you can no longer do
now yes a real pro alignment guy, they can drill holes and make all
kinds of adjustments, if they want to spend the time and energy, but most
places, they're just going to do the one adjustment they can do and leave it at
that, so if you had a pothole or something, and major damage is done that
bends the strut or the a-frame, you need to replace parts, it needs a lot more
than just the simple alignment, so if you're driving in a place that has
pretty good roads, your not always smack into the giant holes, the only thing
they can adjust is the in and the out of the tire, so it
really doesn't need to be done all that often, if your car doesn't pull to one
side or the other, or shake at high speeds, and the tires aren't wearing unevenly
you don't need a front end alignment, a tire that needed alignment
you'd have either scalloped wear on the inside or the outside
this one's perfectly even, so you can see the alignment doesn't need to be touched
so in many modern cars, guys will just try to always sell you an alignment, oh
you need tires and an alignment, well let's face it if your old tires didn't wear
really unevenly, it doesn't shake on a highway or pull one side to the other
you don't really need a front end alignment, but if you do need a front end alignment
don't follow what some guys and say in videos that you can get little rulers, measure it and
adjust it yourself, we're dealing with thousandths of an inch under loaded and
unloaded conditions, it has to be done by a pro with some very good equipment like
this, a serious job needs serious equipment, these laser-guided alignment
systems are extremely accurate, they go to thousands of an inch, they'll find any
problems that an alignment system has, and then they can make adjustments, you
can't do this stuff at home, they do the rear wheels, they do the front wheels
they're computer driven with expert information, they have the adapters that
you put on all of the four wheels to make sure it's set right, and the laser
measures are extremely accurate, needless to say, you can't do this at
home, unless you want to spend a lot of money, you leave it to a pro, now again when I was a
younger mechanic, you only had to worry about front-end alignments, because the
rear of the car, most cars were all rear-wheel drive with a solid axle and
there was no adjustments in the back, but not so in most modern cars, most modern
cars have independent suspension, and the rear suspension has alignment bars too
as you can see as we go under here, there's an alignment bar here for the
right rear tire, and alignment bar here for the left rear tire, like the tie rods
in the front, these rods have adjustable nuts, so you can adjust the side-to-side
motion of the rear tires, now these rear
adjustments, really don't need to be touched all that often, because it's
pretty solid in the rear-end, generally what happens to the rear is either you
get in a wreck or you hit a giant pothole, something gets bent and if it's only
bent a little, you can use these bars to adjust for the bend and as nutty as it
may sound, if your rears are really badly out of alignment, it makes the front end
act squirrely, just the way it feeds back into the front, so I've had many people
over the years bring me a car that had been hit in the
back or in a giant pothole with one of the rear tires and they'll say, oh my
front ends acting squirrely and it was actually the back end that was out of
alignment causing the front to shimmy, now there's more modern rear
independence set up in the back, makes the vehicles ride a lot better and corner
a lot better too, but you do have to realize, it's yet another thing that you
have to have checked every once in a while, so that you don't have any
alignment problems, but of course the same advice is true in the back as the
front, if your tires are wearing evenly like these tires, they don't get any
shaking or anything, odds are your rear alignment it's perfectly fine, really the
main time you'd want the rear checked, would be if you hit a big pothole or got
in a wreck, anytime you get in any kind of wreck, you would definitely want a
four wheel alignment done before you pick the car up, because you want to make
sure that there isn't any damage and of course if there was, it would wear the
tires out and take a while, and then the insurance might not pay for it, so you
would want that done anytime your car was in any kind of a wreck, you'd want
all four wheels aligned, so now you know a little bit more about front end
alignments, how really you can never do it accurately yourself, because it's such
small thousandth of an inch gradations, but that you really may not have to have
it done very often, so if you never want to miss another one
of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!