Wheel Alignment
If the car pulls to one side on a flat, straight road, or the steering wheel sits crooked when you're driving dead straight, that's an alignment problem. Another sign is tire wear on the inside or outside edge of the tread but not the middle. Some drivers notice the steering wheel vibrate or feel loose at highway speed. Any of these are worth getting looked at before the tires wear further.
Alignment usually goes out from hitting a pothole, curbing a wheel, or just from age as bushings and suspension parts wear. It's common after new tires or after suspension work, which is why some shops build it into that job automatically. If you've had new tires put on somewhere else and never had the alignment checked, that's worth asking about.
The job itself involves putting the car on an alignment rack and measuring the angles of each wheel against the manufacturer's specs, then adjusting the steering and suspension components to bring them back into range. On most cars this takes under an hour. If a part is bent or a bushing is worn out, that has to be fixed first or the alignment won't hold, and we'll tell you that before doing the adjustment rather than after.
Cost varies depending on what the car needs and whether anything else has to be repaired first. What we can say for certain is that a bad alignment costs you tires. A tire that's worn unevenly from months of driving out of alignment is not coming back, and a full set costs a lot more than the alignment would have.
On an older car with worn-out suspension bushings, tie rods, or ball joints, an alignment by itself won't hold for long. In that case we'll walk you through what's worn and let you decide whether it's worth fixing those parts too, or whether the car's at a point where that money is better spent elsewhere. We'd rather tell you that up front than have you back in a month with the same pull.
We're in Graham, open Saturdays until 6, which helps if weekday time off isn't easy to come by. Nick handles most of the diagnostic and driveability side of things if there's a question about whether it's alignment or something in the suspension.