O.T. Alignment question


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Posted by D Sherman [72.47.9.228] on Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 18:23:47 :

Our new trolley at the mine tour is eating front tires at a frightening rate. It's basically a bus with a fancy body, and pretty heavy. It runs 9.00-22.5s on 6-lug budd rims with duallies in the rear on a single axle. We've been burning through one pair of tires every season, which comes down to about 3000-4000 miles. They wear rapidly on the outside. I can't stretch a tape between the tires at any point because of other stuff that's in the way, but the wheels are visibly cambered out at the top sides. We had it in a local shop last winter for an alignment but they never told us the camber was off, and they didn't have an alignment jig to do it properly either. It ate another set of tires this summer and blew one out. Fortunately the bus has power steering and the driver didn't dump it in the creek, but the experience put some fear into people. We took it back to the local shop and they said it was toed-out, and adjusted it to something like 1/8 or 1/4" to toe-in. Since they had adjusted it before, and we hadn't hit any big bumps, I'm not sure how it got so far out. That's when they told me to look at the camber.

One option, I've been told, is to toe the wheels out in order to compensate for this excessive camber. It seems to me that although this might equalize the wear, it will just make the tires wear quickly all across the tread. Ironically when I went and looked at it today as the season is almost over, the tires actually look pretty good. They are visibly worn (we just put them on a month ago) but the wear is even and they aren't scalloped.

I've mentioned this alignment problem here before, I don't need to go back over all that, but what I'm wonder is what you think of using toe-out to compensate for excessive camber. I'll be the first to admit I don't know the magic of the relationships between the three angles of front-end geometry, but I've never heard of compensating for excessive camber with negative toe-in. Is it reasonable that a bus would have wheels cambered out enough to be visible? The axle does not appear to have hit anything or gotten bent.



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