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What's your complaint with the alignments?
The steering wheel is never centered. Alignment could be off too but I have little way of knowing that in the short term.
How far off is the steering wheel? Is it possible it is very slight to account for highway crowning?
It’s definitely off. On flat roads it’s about 10 degrees off.
Probably because it is quicker to align one wheel to the other, rather than align two wheels to a centred steering wheel.
I never really thought about it before, but I used to have a car where the steering wheel was about 10 degrees off after having the wheels aligned. I assume they used the nearside wheel as the datum and aligned the offside wheel. Unfortunately the nearside wheel was getting a beating when I was curbing it.
They’re supposed to be using their fancy laser machine (Hunter)? I wouldn’t be surprised if they cut corners though.
Are you by chance a large individual? Even a smaller person sitting in the car will affect the alignment, but a big MFer will affect it a lot.
I’m not a big guy. I know it’s wrong because one time they didn’t wrong twice on my truck and after complaining they finally got it perfectly set.
Gotcha! I can't say I've had the same experience. I've had good luck with Les Schwab and the one PointS that I've used.
I wonder if they're passing it off to junior techs?
Maybe. After complaining to a GM once after getting it wrong twice they got it spot on so not sure if that means the wrong person was doing the job or the right person doing it poorly.
What's the vehicle YMM?
Definitely important. Almost anyone can align my pickup trucks but a performance car with AWD? That might be tough.
And some cars just suck.
I had one that would be perfectly aligned when I left the shop, and an hour later would be off. Crappy American car, subframe bushings had enough give to cause this, there was no fixing it.
Most recently a 2019 Atlas AWD but experienced this with other vehicles as well. Updated original post with vehicles.
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2024
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