Has anyone experienced issues with their front tires on 2013 Ford F150? I have a 2013 F150 with less than 20,000 miles with significant wear on the outer edges of the front tires. The dealer has alignment it twice rotated the tires 4 or 5 times and the problem isn’t solved. I now have 4 tires with outer edge wear. Looking for suggestions on what the root cause might be. The dealer can’t figure out what’s causing the problem.
It’d be well worth the cost to take it to an independent chassis shop for an alignment and printed report. My wild guess is that the dealer knows it needs a camber kit but doesn’t want to install one for some reason.
I agree with TSM, more negative camber (tilt the tire in). The factory settings are for the “average” driver. If, for some reason, your driving is a bit different, lots of twisty roads, for example, it may be better to add some negative camber. The dealer should stay within the factory tolerances, but set it more negative as specs will allow.
Were you given a printout of the alignment specs?
Outer edge wear means too much positive camber or too much toe in.
Just because it is a dealer does not mean they have a competent suspension/alignment guy.
Or an alignment machine that isn’t out of calibration.
That’s just outrageous. I can adjust a Ford pickup using bubble scales on a level floor.
It’s still baffling that the truck could go through 2 alignments and a herd of tire rotations and still exhibit the same problem.
One would think that if the alignment rack was out of calibration their alignment tech would be screaming bloody murder or refusing to even run a car up on the rack.
That’s what happened at one dealer where I worked. The alignment rack would show every car as having 1 degree positive camber on the right front wheel when a blind man could plainly see it was zero or in the negative. The company refused to have the rack calibrated and after several weeks we just boycotted the rack and refused to use it.
Around the same time we all boycotted the new Snap-On wheel balancer which on its best day was a boat anchor. A horrible, horrible POS in spite of the beaucoup amount of money it cost.
Thank you for the information. Hopefully, this will help resolving the problem.
Taking corners too fast on high profile tires will do it.
You won’t fix it. Turn your wheels all the way right or left and you will see how much the wheel is tipped. It’s just built that way. It’s caused by steering axis inclination and positive caster to extremes.
Just an FYI:
Once a tire develops an odd wear pattern caused by a misalignment condition. fixing the misalignment doesn’t fix the tire wear problem. That wear pattern will be the starting point for any new wear pattern, so the tires could be wearing evenly, but they started out uneven, so they continue to be uneven.
I have the same problem on my 1970’s Ford truck. I just live with the excess outside wear on the front tires. I have to replace the front tires a little more often is all. Not a problem for me as I don’t drive very many miles per year in the truck.
I think the Ford designers set it up so the handles its best, and the bogus tire wear pattern is a side effect when turning corners at speed in a heavy vehicle with a high center of gravity. I expect a person could do some experiments, make some adjustments to the alignment parameters, and maybe suffer some handling performance, but reduce the excess outer edge wear. I was thinking as a first step, before messing with the camber, setting the toe-in to be a little more on the dead-ahead side of things; i.e. less toe-in. But that’s a lot of work when dealing with 40 year old rusty adjustment gadgets and given that it might make the truck handle (even more) poorly, to me not worth the time to try it.
Cdogg, I’d love to see a printout of your alignment readings. If we can help you from that information, it might be worth visiting a good chassis shop. You’ll quickly eat up the cost of a good alignment at a good shop by allowing that outside edge wear to continue. Routine tire replacements because of it will cost a lot more than getting it corrected if possible… especially at today’s tire prices.
George, I extend the offer to you as well. You’re a good man, and if you think it’ll help…
Did you buy the truck new? Are the tires on it the ones that came from the factory?