sorry for bad alt text, I lack the terminology to describe this accurately
(i’m not a mechanic, i have no earthly idea if this is accurate. Don’t sue me)
Is there any reason other than appearance to have your wheels negatively cambered? I see it pretty frequently these days and it just looks stupid and wears out your tires in weird ways.
In certain driving conditions it can improve cornering, but for most cases, oem recommended angles are best. Extreme negative camber is purely cosmetic and wears out your tires in weird ways.
What’s going on with the caster picture? Not sure what it is showing.
It’s showing the ‘knuckle’ the wheel is mounted to leading forward and backward.
it has to do with the angle between the point the tire pivots (steers) on and the point the wheel spins on. The steering point needs to be forward of the spinning point to help the car go straight down the road. Think of a shopping carts front wheels (they’re called casters), and how they’ll pivot around with the direction you’re pushing the cart. That angle can be adjusted so the car tracks properly…
I remember one time I changed my struts, rotors, pads, and mounted new tires myself. When I was done, I had to drive it about 30 miles to get it aligned. During the drive to the shop, its alignment was “all of the above” in the graphic 😆
0/10 do not recommend.
If you do work like this at home you can often get the alignment close enough for the drive to the alignment shop by taking precise measurements before disassembly, paying attention to the amount of turns on end joints etc…
The best option is still to trailer it to an alignment shop, ofc.
In my defense, I was going to take it to the shop down the road (~3 miles) but they were backed up for a week.
That’s a good defense :)
What’s with those cars that camber their tires all crazy on purpose? Style or is there a functional reason?
Standard street performance is around 1-2 deg negative camber, an experienced eye can tell when looking at the car from the outside but it’s not super obvious. Aggressive track camber is around 3-4 deg, that’s getting a bit more obvious to the naked eye, but still looks fairly normal. The cars you’re talking about with like 10+ deg of camber, where the outside of the tire isn’t even touching the pavement, is just the owners making their car handle like shit and burn through tires every 1000 miles because they think it looks cool.
Crazy negative camber is just a style thing. You can see fairly aggressive/negative camber on racing cars, and on a track it serves a purpose, but even in those cases it usually much milder than what I think you’re referring to .
I wouldn’t worry too much about the alt text anyways. Alt text is mostly meant for blind people, and last I checked, blind people don’t drive or work on vehicles.
I looked it up because I was curious and there are atleast two blind mechanics. Can’t speak as to how effective alt text would be in teaching most blind people though, I imagine it’d be way easier to learn hands-on
Chat, is this ableist?
The DMV I used to go to had a vending machine that said profits went towards supporting an all blind baseball team. I’m still not sure if it was legitimate: I get that “blind” could mean with 20/400 vision, which isn’t that difficult to correct well enough to play baseball, but that seems like one of the worst sports to play with limited visual input.
Every time I saw it, I had this thought process, then scolded myself for limiting people, then thought about how dangerous a fastball can be, then scolded myself again. I haven’t thought about that in a decade at least.
Hey, just stating the obvious, the diagram wouldn’t be very useful for a blind person anyways.
Besides, how would you write out alt text that clearly explains the diagram for blind people?
If you can think up a good explanation that makes sense, feel free to offer OP some suggestions…
unaligned
misaligned
the over and under-inflation wear isn’t as much of an issue these days as it used to be. In the old days of bias-ply tires, that was definitely the case. You could have a low tire and hardly be able to tell, because the stiff sidewalls would hardly sag. Their flex point was down the middle of the tread. Radial tire construction puts the flex point in the sidewalls, which doesn’t distort the tread as much, plus gives a much smoother ride…
Me, I have Multiproblem.
Time before ABS: local wear
Lol if this is that I think it is, I’ve always just called it a “flat spot”
