Home alignment help

[bignasty]

Can anyone please tell me why the center treads on my tire look like they are being pulled up. No alignment shop will touch it because theres the typical geo holes in the frame horns which i plan on fixings but i want the tires to be straight befor I start welding and make it solid. Any help will be greatly appriciated.

[oil pan 4]

I'm thinking that tire looks like it might be pointed in too much.
Does the other tire do it too?

[mort]

This is called feathering. Feathering is often caused by improper toe aligment. When the car has excessive toe in, the feathers point toward the center of the vehicle. When there is excessive toe out, the feathers point away from the vehicle.

Toe out may also be due to worn or damaged parts.

-mort

[bignasty]

Yes the other side is the same and both the insides wear extremely fast. Thanks I'd just never seen it befor and couldnt figure it out

[RiceCake]

Assuming your car has the same wheelbase on the front and the rear, which almost every car does, easy check is to straighten the front tires and run a piece of string along the car.

If you do it very carefully and tweak the front steering wheel so all four tires are "straight", you can usually hold the string and get a very good idea if a tire is substantially out of whack or not.

I've aligned cars using this method but it takes a ton of time and skill and ingenuity to get it just perfect but, if you think your alignment is out of whack you can probably use this trick to see just how bad it may be for free.

[ThomCat316]

Here's a link to a Porsche forum that shows a cheap toe gague and how to use it.

I do my own toe alignments using the (borrowed) deluxe version of this tool, but at the price they're discussing I may run off to HF to get one of these.

Only caution about it is that you have to bounce the front end a bit and roll the car back and forth some feet to get the adjustment settled between measurements - or get four hardened, ground and lapped steel plates with grease between them, a pair each under your front wheels to be glide bearing for your front end.

[Frank Lee]

Or just use a tape measure.