Test For Determing If A Front End Alignment Is Required ?

That's one, Then look real close at the tires. Wear patterns can tell you a lot.

can give you some ideas of what to look for.

Alignment itself wont do you a lot of good if you got bad ball joints, tie-rod ends, struts and other front end parts that can degrade

bob

If you take it to a competent professional alignment specialist, they will check over your suspension, drive your car, and tell you that you need an alignment or maybe you need new control arm bushings or whatever.

If you take it to the local tire store, God only knows WHAT will happen, but you can be sure you'll be sold a lot of things you don't need and your car will probably handle worse than it did before.

--scott

Is this a car you've had for a while or one you know nothing about? How many miles are on it. What kind of roads was it driven on.... If you know nothing about it about the only things you can tell from driving it is whether the steering wheel is centered and whether the car pulls to one side or the other when you are going straight ahead on level ground and take you hands off the wheel. If the steering wheel is off center and/or the car pulls to one side it probably needs at least a wheel alignment. But it might need parts replaced too. Might even need tires, sometimes bad tires will make a car pull badly to the side.

If you've owned the car for a while you can also look at how the tires are wearing and see if they are wearing evenly or not.

One of the problems of assessing the need for wheel alignment is that some of the things that can be "out of alignment" won't necessarily be noticeable to the driver, esp if you are not used to how the car

*should* drive. And if the tires were just replaced you won't be able to tell much from how they are wearing unless the alignment is so screwed up it's literally chewing up the tires. If the caster is out of spec the car may wander more then it really should be in most cases you probably won't notice much if you aren't quite familiar with how it *should* drive.

In my experience, most cars built in the past couple decades that have not been driven over curbs or subjected to harsh pothole abuse will not need wheel alignment for at least 50k miles. And even then they most likely will only need the toe adjusted. Now that doesn't mean they would still be perfectly in spec if you put them on a machine, it just means they will still be 'close enough' that they don't have a problem that needs fixing, except possibly for the toe.

You should be able to find a decent shop if you are in a large metro area that will do an alignment check on a computerized machine with a printout showing what's in/out of spec. and that will do the check for $10 or $20 and then you can decide if you want to get it aligned for another $60 or so.

The bottom line IMHO, for a car you are not familiar with at least, is that if the steering wheel is off center you should figure it needs a wheel alignment. It's probably either smacked a curb or big pothole or it's just got enough wear on the suspension that it needs an alignment.

Ashton Crusher wrote: "p if you are in a large metro area that will do an alignment check on a computerized machine with a printout showing what's in/out of spec. and that will do the check for $10 or $20 and then you can decide if you want to get it aligned for another $60 or so. "

HA HA HAAAA!! "Another $60 or so.."

You my friend definitely are not from nor have never lived in western Connecticut. Around here front-ends START at $100, and then $150-200 for 4-whl.

Another check is to find a flat level car park. Make sure tyre pressures are correct. Turn left and right with almost full lock. If it goes smoothly in one direction, but the other is scrubbing, you might have camber or castor wrong on one side.