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Old 04-15-2011, 03:29 PM   #16 (permalink)
CapriRacer
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Just so everyone understands:

Steer tires tend to wear on the shoulders, where drive tires tend to wear in the center.

On Rear Wheel Drive (RWD), these two things occur separately and you can see the difference. The wear rates are about the same, but the pattern is different.

On Front Wheel Drive (FWD), both of those occur on the same axle - the front - while the rear pretty much just tracks behind. Because both of those actions are on the same axle, the wear is even across the face of the tread but the wear rate is substantially higher than the rear. My figures show about 2 1/2 times faster.

The above assumes reasonable toe in and camber values. Needless to say, toe accelerates the wear rate at the end where the excessive toe occurs.

But when there is a lot of camber involved, the amount of toe acts like a multiplier. It not only accelerates the rate of wear, but causes irregular wear to accellerate as well.

Put another way, if you have a vehicle with a lot of toe and little camber, you will get a little irregular wear. If you have a vehicle with a lot of camber and little toe, you will get a little irregular wear, but if you have a vehicle with a lot of camber and a lot of toe, you get irregular wear WAY out of proportion campared to the effect of one or the other individually.

So when you are looking at irregular wear - as per the first post in this thread, he has the classic symptoms of noise and rough riding - we need to look at what the camber values are. The camber values might be spec'd arbitraily high in order to get good handling features - and it does that - but at the expense of tire wear. Add excessive toe, and the problem gets large in a hurry.
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