Front tyres causing pull to left

Hi, is it possible for a set of front tyres to make a car pull to the left?

I bought a car off a family member a year ago knowing that it pulled to the left, and assumed it was probably the tracking. I had the tracking done and it made no difference. So i then had a 4 wheel laser alignment done (at a different place) and that showed everything was aligned correctly (camber, castor, toe on all 4 wheels). I knew the car had been involved in an accident where the right rear wheel and arch were hit, so i put the pull down to a bent chassis or similar!

Anyway, last weekend i had the front tyres changed and now the car tracks dead straight! No work was done except for the tyre change. So it seems the fitting of new tyres has solved the problem. Could one of the old tyres have been badly shaped or similar? I don't think taking the wheels off and refitting them could have made a difference (especially as i've had them off myself a couple of times previously to check the brake pads etc while servicing the car).

The car is a 1988 Nissan Bluebird (40k miles) and the tyres (both old and new) are Nankang 165/80R14s.

TIA, Jon.

Reply to
aw114ageuk
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yes

Reply to
Angus McCoatup©

Most definately. Wear on the treads will cause this. If you had swapped the fronts over you'd have seen the effect.

Reply to
Taz

"...

Dependent upon the bias and fabric lays etc during tyre construction a tyre will rarely track true. If you look at some Original Equipment tyres fitted to new cars, they will have a red dot on the sidewall. This is put on by the tyre producer to indicate the way the tyre 'pulls' All should be on the outside of the wheel when fitted. When I worked for Michelin, the tyres were tested by inflating them between rims and running the tyre against a large flywheel which detected various uniformity parameters, one of which was the bias and was stamped on the sidewall.

Reply to
Gio

I bought 2 new Michelins for a Vectra I once owned and it made the car pull to the left quite bad. Every wee bump on the road exaggerated the pull. I went back to the garage who incidentally had also done a wheel alignment for me and told them. They tried to blame the camber in the road. Eventually I persuaded the manager to come in the car with me. He kind of agreed and changed the tyres to a different type of Michelin and the pull disappeared!!

Reply to
Howdy

" I bought 2 new Michelins for a Vectra I once owned and it made the car pull

A rear tyre on a Cavalier I had deformed the other way, like an egg. Towing the caravan slowly on a smooth road I could see it moving up and down. DaveK

Reply to
davek

Thanks for all the replies, and for confirming that tyres can cause a pull. Amazing (or perhaps not) that both tyre places i visited for tracking/alignment hadn't a clue what was causing the pull, and certainly didn't consider that the tyres could be responsible.

Reply to
aw114ageuk

Yes

But surely you would have noticed the uneven tyre wear?

Reply to
R. Murphy

I did notice it during my weekly checks, yes.

Actually it was amazingly slight. When i got rid of them, the right side of each was just above the 1.6mm marker, while the left sides were no more than 1mm higher than that. As i mentioned, the car had been hit on the OSR wheel at one point in its life, so in the absense of any explanation for the pull from tyre places, i put the pull down to the accident bending the chassis or similar. So i expected uneven tyre wear as a *sympton* of the pull, rather than suspecting it or poor tyre manufacture as the *cause* of the pull.

Reply to
aw114ageuk

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk saying something like:

It's happened to my heaps several times and mostly caused by budget tyres.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

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