Front Wheel Alignment, With a Tape Measure

okay for an example I'm using this GMC truck um you can do this with pretty much any vehicle I'm going to check the alignment and when I say that I actually really mean tow in um cuz I'm not checking the complete alignment only the tow in okay now to do this my main tools are going to be a jack a couple pieces of 4x4 a good tape measure and a piece of chalk okay okay now if you think you have an alignment problem there's one quick check you can do you can lay your hand flat on your tire and rub across and rub back and if it's towed in or towed out um excessively what'll happen is um the edge of these tread right here one side will be rounded over real smooth and the other side will actually get a edge on it you know and it'll feel sharp um that's what they're calling feather edging so if you rub your hand over one way and it's smooth and come back the other way and it's and it's catching you and you feel them little edges then you probably have a toe in toe out problem now one thing to keep in mind always look at your tires before you go rubbing on them because if you have a severe alignment issue or your tires are wor out and you got metal cords coming through them you don't want to be rubbing your hand on them all right okay okay now what we're going to going to do before we start we want to get on a straight piece of road and we want to drive a little bit and we you want to make sure the steering wheel is fairly straight okay because if it's off like this and you're going straight down the road or off like this and you're going straight down the road we need to know that because once we jack this up and put our lines around the tires let it back down and let the vehicle roll forward to relax the suspension we're going to want the steering wheel somewhere in the same orientation as it is driving up and down the street all right that should assure that your wheels are as straight ahead as they can be okay cuz now when if we know that the steering wheel's off one way or the other and we got to make tire rod in adjustments what that'll do is let us decide which side of the truck to make the adjustment on to bring the steering wheel back straight okay so that's why it's important to know if your steering wheels one way or the other when you're rolling forward okay now one thing to keep in mind there's many ways of doing this whether you use a string method from the front to the back or however you do it there's a lot of ways to get your toe in close now this is not as accurate as any alignment machine would be but this will get you in the ballpark um okay now that we got this jacked up I only jacked the one side up because it was easier on this truck for me just to Jack one up you can do both if you want all we're doing is trying to make a reference line you could measure tire grooves you know from side to side but the problem with that is most tires will have a little bit of run out so you might not actually get a perfect measurement so what I like to do is I like to get me a piece of chalk a crayon anything to make a mark on the tire I like to hold it right there okay so it doesn't move and then you just spin the tire around and this ought to give you a straight Mark to measure off of all the way around the tire all right we'll go a little okay I know that's going to be faint you can't already see that but now if I make this Mark on the tire spinning around and a mark on that tire theoretically I should have two points around the tire equal with no run out no movement now you're never going to be exact but you'll be really close this way all right so now what we're going to do is let the vehicle down now you don't have to do this step um you can do it with the valve stem or whatever I like to make a Mark that tells me where my tire started out all right and I'm going to go do the same thing on the other side I'm going to do the same thing over here I just want to make a mark okay so now that'll be all we need for our chalk for now and as you can see I have the line around this tire also okay I'm not exactly sure if you can see me or not hear what I'm doing but we had the car jacked up and we put it back down all right now to actually get the suspension to relax and all the components to relax like they would be normally the reason I put the mark on the wheel is I want to roll this truck forward now I want to go with the minimum of one revolution on that tire two wouldn't hurt you okay so here's what we're going to do and at this point also try to make it so that your tires as you're pulling up try to make sure your tires are pointing Straight Ahead okay okay now when we rolled this vehicle forward the steering wheel was fairly straight and this vehicle back it went fairly straight okay now if you know that when you're driving the truck or whatever and you know the wheel's off a little bit one way or the other and you know that's straight um that would be one thing that when you do your roll up you'd want your steering wheel to be kind of in a position it is naturally driving down the street so if it's off to one side or the other let it roll when you roll it forward with the steering wheel in that position okay now I've slid a 4x4 up against the tire here okay this is going to be the height we're going to take all our measurements off of all our measurements are going to come off the height of a 4x4 it hasn't it doesn't have to be a 4x4 I'm just using this because that's what I have there now with me being here by myself doing this I'm going to take the edge of this 4x4 and I'm going to line it up with the outside of my mark that I made around the tire that way it gives me somewhere to hook the tape measure and when I go across the other side and pull I know I have it tight okay if you have a second person they can hold the tape measure here but always try to measure off of something to the same height that way you're not up or down and changing your dimension and you want to be in the same height when you measure the front as you do when you measure the back so it's just a good thing to use something like a 4x4 a brick or just whatever you have laying around long as you got two of them the same height okay now that I'm here I got my tape measure and you want to use a a good or tape measor so you don't get no sag what we're going to do is hook hook that block then we're going come over here and we're going to take a measurement and to the outside of my line right here I have 68 in exact all right so you can either remember that measurement or you can jot that down but we have 68 in from the outside of the mark to the outside of the mark and now my my next step is I'm going to want to go behind the front tires and I want to put that same board on the same side here on this side I'm going to line my mark up okay here you can see now I want to line my mark up with the edge of that Tu before on the same side I did before okay on the same side of the line and everything okay so we're going major across here we was 68 in the front okay if we come back here major to that line a touch over 68 and an eigh so we're like everything but 68 and 3/16 is what we are here so I'm going to call that good because it should have some tow end so when you're going down the road again you know it spreads that out here's the tire rod end on this truck okay um if I had to adjust the toe in in or out I would do it with these TI rod ends either it' be the driver's side tie rod end or the passenger that would depend on where my steering wheel was that's part of the reason that when we rolled the truck forward and tried to make it go straight we tried to make the steering wheel like it was going up and down the highway um that way if we have to adjust we can try to straighten the steering wheel out some now once we've loosened these up we want to take the wheel the weight off the wheel um and make our adjustment you can measure and kind of guesstimate on the tire you know if you got to go an eighth or a quarter or whatever your measurement said you had to go once you get that done you're going to want to let the weight back down on the ground and then you're going to want to do the roll the vehicle forward at least one turn of the wheel so that you can relax the suspension and get everything backward SS and then um you'll check it again with the Boors measuring it and you'll do that until you get it right okay so even good tie rod ends and stuff there's a little bit of play okay it doesn't you got ball joints tie rod ends you got numerous moving Parts um also Flex some tie rod ends in different places or bent a little bit you'll always have a little bit of flex there that's why the tow end should be set in a little bit or out depending on whatever the manufacturer recommendations are and a lot of that depends on whether the tire rod ends are in front or the back of the front you know axle it's all in design um but the reason that is is whenever you go up and down the highway those tires actually spread till all the plague gets out of all the stuff and the tire out ends ball joints or whatever you have even if they're brand new they'll have a little bit of movement in them and um that's why they do the tow in so that when you're going down the road and the tires will actually be running straight and [Applause] true

Channel: wtbm123

Views: 958,385

Keywords: Front wheel alignment, alignment, tape measure, do it yourself, tire, set toe in, wheel alignment, self wheel alignment, adjust toe, front wheel, tire alignment, Toe (automotive), abnormal tire wear, tire wear, wtbm123, car repair, auto repair

Id: 2vaiYZx7mOw

Length: 10min 51sec (651 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2013