So I was hooning my vehicle and I will not lie, I crashed into a curb. It bent the rim and the steering wheel felt very off. I had a top alignment shop look at it and they said i knocked the toe out. How does that get knocked out of whack if nothing got bent? They realigned it and put a good used rim on and said its good to go.
Ive always argues a car never needs an alignment unless something is bent or worn.
So something had to have gotten bent right? Im confused. Maybe it was just bent enough that an alignment could overcome it?
They said nothing was bent. I fully expected something to be bent other than the rim. I was driving my caprice and doing fishtails like they used to do on COPS. It was on a deserted area with no one at risk but myself.
There’s always some clearance in all the attachments in the front end. Best case you pushed parts around, resulting in the need for an alignment. Or you actually did bend something slightly, just not enough that the shop could find.
A cars subframe is bolted to chassis. If you loosen bolts you can shift subframe slightly. Which will affect alignment. Your control arms are bolted to subframe. And attachment points can be tweaked with a good curb hit. A cars frame is a welded box. If you hit something hard enough now it is a parallelogram.
Sounds to me like perhaps a tie-rod or adjusting sleeve may have been bent…not enough to see and not enough to damage it or warrant replacement. It doesn’t take much. If you look at the geometry of steering linkage, the smallest distortion can cause alignment angles to be out.
There are also numerous rubber bushings that have sagged/worn on a car that age. When did you last have it aligned? How do you know that the alignment was spot on before you did your curb diving?
Years ago we had an elderly woman babysitter that drove a 62 meteor. She hit a tree or something. Fender, bumper,grill, and in addition actually bent the tie rod end into a U. I did the parts replacement, painting, etc. for a couple hundred dollars, but I told her she had to take it to a shop for an alignment.
She yelled at me because it cost her money for the alignment. After insurance wanted to total it but I negotiated a $500 buy out for her so she made a couple hundred on the deal. Plus after painting the fender, I polished the rest of the car to match better. Yeah no good deed. Fairly easy to see it needed alignment.
More to the story if anyone wants to hear it but I’ve got work to do. Dad taught me to respect my elders, but . . .
I have lifetime alignments on all my vehicles except the new truck (it will have one soon enough) and they all have the alignment checked every 5,000ish miles, they are almost just a tad out of spec and are adjusted back to be within spec… I have done or watched it being done on almost everyone of mine, so I know it is legit…
It is recommended to check and adjust IF needed every 5K miles or once a year… Of the vehicles that we ran across the alignment rack (5-20+ a day) over 60% of them need adjusting to put back into specs… Heck my daughter bought her lifetime alignment right after she bought her car before it ever hit the rack so she didn’t have to worry about it when it was time for her 1st oil change, rotate & balance and alignment check…
BTW, just because it does not pull, does not mean the alignment is good, total toe being out of adjustment is what we call the silent killer, it can/will wear the tires and not pull…
Stuff happens, got new tires, decided to have an alignment done, Left rear was needing big adjustment, all the others were mild adjustments. who knows?
Around here(Buffalo NY area) a lot of places that sell lifetime alignments do so only to sell unneeded repairs.
Many years ago bought a new Impala. No free oil changes then and he had a Firestone dealer a short walk from his house so he decided to use them for oil changes.
On his second oil change, they sold him a “lifetime” alignment. When he brought his year and a half old car in for an oil change and alignment check wit 15,000 miles on it. they presented him with a $1200 list of needed repairs.
He was stunned so he told them he had to think about it. He called me for advice and I told him to call my mechanic because I did not think all of that list could be true.
My mechanic checked out evberything on the list and told him there was absolutely nothing wrong with his car, refused to charge him abd gained a customer for life.
Yep, just like ANY shop or dealer, there are good ones and there are bad ones, it all depends on the people working their…
Our Reginal Manager said show and tell, take the customer out to the vehicle if at all possible and show the customer the failed parts…
I have texted video to customers and or pictures to show them a failed part(s)… We had one of the TOP districts in the USA…
By the time I had started with them the company used MAP standards…
At the last shop I ran (managed), I jumped on the tablet-based paperless bandwagon pretty early. Every inspection was electronic and emailed/texted to the customer showing. I found out pretty quickly that the service writers needed to estimate the repairs before sending the inspection videos out. Send a customer a video of a ball joint with 1/2" of play or coolant leaking out of a water pump and often they’re on the phone asking how much and when before we could have prices together.
Must have been Firestone? I have a friend who managed their stores and they hit the MAP stuff pretty hard.