Wheel Alignment

Wheel alignment is one of those seemingly small things that can heavily influence how well your car runs. If your wheels are not nearly perfectly aligned, it causes uneven wear on the tires and lowers gas mileage.

Warning signs

The most obvious sign of a car that needs its wheels realigned is a tendency to pull in one direction or another (though it is sometimes the fault of other causes). If you live in a rainy or snowy area, another clear sign is that the wheels grip while moving straight but tend to slip while turning in a specific direction. In extremely bad cases, it may even affect how the brake pads contact the wheels, which makes braking dangerously unreliable.

Briefly let go of your steering wheel while driving straight to see if your car pulls in one direction or the other. If it does, it may need a wheel alignment.

How to check

In order to check quickly for misalignment, a mechanic puts the car up on a lift and checks the wear on the tire treads. On properly aligned wheels, the tires should wear evenly across the whole surface; however, on a misaligned wheel, the tire wears jaggedly, either creating a sawtooth pattern or a pattern where one side is worn down much farther than the other. You can do this yourself with a jack and some patience, but it really is something best left to professionals.

Fixing it

Most of the time, wheel alignment is not difficult to fix, but it is time-consuming because there are multiple ways that tires are misaligned. The front tires may point inward (toe-in) or tilt at an angle other than vertical to the road (camber), the back tires could point in a direction different from the front tires (thrust angle) and other, less common problems are all different ways that tires are misaligned.

Taking a car to a mechanic is something that people are sometimes reluctant to do, with the common belief that mechanics are all thieves who 'fix' things that are not wrong and charge you for parts you do not need. Sadly, this is sometimes true; however, many conscientious mechanics correct other problems they find while fixing the first problem, especially during a common procedure such as a wheel alignment. Just approach them as equals, tell them what you think is wrong and ask them to call you before fixing anything else they find.

One of those seemingly small things that can influence how well your car runs