Alignment Toe Gauge

Alignment Toe Gauge

How to Read Your Tires and What They're Trying to Tell You

Improper tire inflation is the single most important factor that causes uneven tire wear. Tire wear will happen naturally thanks to friction that happens during driving, and it's this friction that makes it possible to drive at all. In the absence of friction (e.g., when attempting to drive on an icy surface) your car will not move. Tires are designed to create friction, which produces the force necessary to propel your car, and over time this friction contributes to tire wear.

There are three easy steps to inspecting your tires: Look, Feel, and Test. First, visually inspect all of your tires. Second, feel the tread by hand to detect wear such as cupping, scalloped dips on the edge of the tire, and feathering, treads with a rounded edge on one side and a sharp edge on the other. Finally, test all four tires with a tire pressure gauge for proper inflation. You can purchase a tire pressure gauge for a few bucks at any auto parts store.

So what exactly are you looking for while inspecting your tires? Here are a few examples of tread wear patterns that may indicate a problem:

Middle Tread Wear
Excessive wear in the middle of your tire may indicate that there is constantly too much air pressure in the tire. This high level of air pressure causes the tire to ride on the center of the tread and wears it prematurely. Sometimes this middle tread wear pattern can result from extremely wide tires on narrow rims.

Outer Tread Wear
Extreme wear on the outer edges of your tire is most often the result of consistent under inflation. Under inflation causes the tire to flatten out and puts too much contact with the road on the outer treads, which then wear rapidly. However, if you've been diligent in frequently assuring that your tires are properly inflated, this type of wear can be the result of a curved or damaged steering element or may indicate the need for a wheel alignment.

One-Side Tread Wear
Another indication of a poor wheel alignment is if you notice that an inner or outer rib wears faster than the rest of the tire. Generally, excessive curvature in the front suspension will cause too much load on one side of the tire, but it's also very possible that the misalignment could be caused by worn ball joints or worn control arm bushings.

"Feathering" and "Cupping" Tread Wear
Feathering is a condition when each tread rib develops a slightly rounded edge on one side and a sharp edge on the other, while cupping is scalloped dips that appear around the edge of the tread on one side or the other. By running your hand over the tire, you can feel the difference between the sharper edges created by feathering and the smoother dips from cupping.

Feathering is most commonly caused by an incorrect toe-in setting, but weakened bushings in the front suspension can also cause the wheel alignment to shift as the car moves down the road.

Cupping is usually an indication of damaged or bent suspension parts. A wheel alignment is a temporary cure at best. Any worn component that connects the wheel to the car (ball joint, wheel bearing, shock absorber, springs, bushings) can cause cupping. Worn components should always be replaced and the worn tire should be balanced and moved to a different location on the car. Occasionally, wheels that are out of balance will wear in this manner, but often wheel imbalance usually shows up as bald spots between the outside edges and center of the tread.

Second-rib Tread Wear
Second-rib wear is typically found only in radial tires and appears where the steel belts end in relation to the tread. If you pay close attention to tire pressure and you consistently rotate the tires, this type of wear can be kept to a minimum. A small amount of wear at the second rib of a radial tire can be considered normal, but excessive amounts of wear point toward tires that are too wide for the wheels.

Remember, the "eyeball" method of tire inflation is almost never a good idea. Simply adding air to your tires until there is no bulge at the bottom is an inaccurate guess at best. Always take a few moments to Look, Feel and Test with a reliable tire gauge and your car's tires will enjoy a long, healthy life.

People have trusted Belle Tire for the best value since 1922. Now we’re working even harder to bring you the best tire price, period! And get you Out-The-Door with More… more value, services and protection the other stores can't offer at any price!

About the Author

Michael Trudel is a freelance writer for local and national marketing companies. Belle Tire is working even harder to bring you the best tire price, period! http://www.BelleTire.com

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Advance Wheel Alignment - Technician Reference Guide: ASP-UC-TG-165-00 $18.49 In this course you will learn about alignment angles you may not have known existed such as SAI, included angle, scrub radius, and toe-out on turns. You will examine rear-wheel alignment procedures as well as learn the techniques for aligning vehicles equipped with electronic suspension and 4-wheel steering systems. You will also discover aftermarket solutions for common alignment failures. All in all, there’s enough information here to make you an alignment specialist!

Advanced Wheel Alignment - Leader Led Kit: ASP-UC-KT-165-00 $253.99 In this course you will learn about alignment angles you may not have known existed such as SAI, included angle, scrub radius, and toe-out on turns. You will examine rear-wheel alignment procedures as well as learn the techniques for aligning vehicles equipped with electronic suspension and 4-wheel steering systems. You will also discover aftermarket solutions for common alignment failures. All in all, there’s enough information here to make you an alignment specialist!

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Primary Wheel Alignment Angles - Leader Led Kit: ASP-UC-KT-164-00 $253.99 Considering the condition of many of our nation’s roads, there will always be a demand for qualified alignment technicians! In this course you will study all of the primary alignment angles including caster, camber, toe, and thrust angle, as well as find out how to adjust these angles on SLA and MacPherson strut suspensions. You will also discover how ride height affects wheel alignment and learn where to check this critical dimension on both domestic and import vehicles.

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Bitext Alignment $45 This book provides an overview of various techniques for the alignment of bitexts. It describes general concepts and strategies that can be applied to map corresponding parts in parallel documents on various levels of granularity. Bitexts are valuable linguistic resources for many different research fields and practical applications. The most predominant application is machine translation, in particular, statistical machine translation. However, there are various other threads that can be followed which may be supported by the rich linguistic knowledge implicitly stored in parallel resources. Bitexts have been explored in lexicography, word sense disambiguation, terminology extraction, computer-aided language learning and translation studies to name just a few. The book covers the essential tasks that have to be carried out when building parallel corpora starting from the collection of translated documents up to sub-sentential alignments. In particular, it describes various approaches to document alignment, sentence alignment, word alignment and tree structure alignment. It also includes a list of resources and a comprehensive review of the literature on alignment techniques.Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic Concepts and Terminology / Building Parallel Corpora / Sentence Alignment / Word Alignment / Phrase and Tree Alignment / Concluding Remarks

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