A Warning About Alignments

In order to get a good wheel alignment, these items must be true:

1) Regardless of the alignment rack used, the alignment is only as good as the technician.

2) The machine must be accurate. Therefore, the alignment system must be serviced periodically by the manufacturer.

3) The proper alignment procedure should be followed, since it can vary significantly from model to model.

Earlier this week, I installed a set of Prius Plus Performance lowering springs. After installation, it was evident that an alignment was needed. So, after driving for three days and about 150 miles, I visited a Sears store to get a free alignment check. (FYI, Sears uses a new proprietary system from Hunter which allows the alignment check to be done in the service drive.)

These were the results from the Sears Alignment Check:



As expected, the front toe was off the charts. The rear toe and camber, while not perfect, seem reasonable considering that the car is now lowered. In the future, I will need to install a EZ shim and SPC spacers to better adjust the toe, but for now it is passable.

Since I have a Firestone lifetime alignment policy, I drove across the parking lot and had Firestone perform an alignment.

Firestone only adjusted the front toe only, as requested. However, do note the huge differences in the other readings compared to the Sears alignment check results.



First, the measured value for left-front camber is fairly similar between the two printouts. The left-rear and right-rear toe readings though, are very different. According to Firestone, I have 0.42deg of toe-in on the LR, but Sears' alignment sensors are stating that I have about 0.25deg of toe-in. This is a 0.17 deg difference between the two readings!

I am not entirely sure what happened, since the sensors were mounted properly in both cases and readings were taken in the correct manner, but the results are very different. This is not comforting at all.

Obviously I will need to have a 3rd opinion, because now I am not sure whose numbers are correct. Someone needs to get their alignment system serviced by Hunter.

As it proves time and time again, chain shops generally cater to a lower quality standard than expert alignment shops and dealerships. It typically takes me three visits to get a "passable" alignment from Firestone, which is quite inefficient. Usually they leave the steering wheel off-center, which they did again this time. Despite how cheaply their lifetime alignment plan is priced, the repeated visits are very frustrating.

Also, Firestone does not always do a zero-point calibration after an alignment, despite having the Hunter codelink tool and the WinAlign software prompting them to do it. Luckily I have the Toyota Techstream Lite software so I do not have to rely on them.

Moral of the story? Find someone competent to do your alignments, and chain shops can be a real crapshoot. And if some chain shops are not already bad enough, having a questionable alignment rack only makes matters a lot worse!

 

Well, bad news. A trip to a third alignment rack confirms that the LR toe is way off-- about 0.35-0.40 depending on the day. Prior to the drop, my LR toe was already in the 0.20-0.24 range, so the drop resulted in an additional 0.10 or so. My RR toe was 0.10-0.15 before the drop, so even with the drop it is OK.

I will be pulling the left-rear hub and installing one of those EZ-SHIMs and spacers next week.

 

Dark, your camber is fairly similar to mine on the rear and front-- in- spec. Though, you have almost no cross-camber in the front, which is great. I will probably need to put a camber bolt in my LF strut in order to reduce the cross-camber.

I'm betting that your LR toe was previously about 0.10, and the drop increased it to what it is now. My RR toe was also affected much less than the LR.