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Originally Posted by rohitbagai  Yea I got it done...but no help...In-fact when I went at Hyundai Motor Plaza for first service there was a guy who's Verna VGT has done 800 KMs only and the wheel alignment was done FIVE TIMES!! And the tires were crossed THRICE. His Car went left as soon as we take our hands off the steering wheel. The engineers at the workshop don’t know what to say as of yet. I invited the owner to drive my Verna and he said that mine too had same problem but it’s balanced as the car goes either way. Well we all know that the roads always have a slope but Verna reacts to slope more than any other car … (may be because of soft suspension)…may be the above mentioned case is an extreme example but I have observed same thing that it does not drive straight most of the times. |
When I fitted tubeless tyres in my Santro, I had the wheels balanced and aligned. When I took the car on the Expressway, I found that the car did tend to pull to the left at speeds in excess of about 110 kmph. I decided to wait. The problem went away after about 1500 kms or so. I think your friend has unnecessarily panicked -- to do wheel alignment 5 times and rotate tyres 3 times within 800 kms was totally unnecessary. Here is a quote from
Car Bibles : The Wheel and Tyre Bible Quote:
What about the coloured stripes in the tread?
Often when you buy tyres, there will be a coloured band or stripe running around the tyre inside the tread. These can be any colour and can be placed laterally almost anyhwere across the tread. Some are on the tread blocks whilst others are on the tyre carcass. For ages I thought this was a uniformity check - a painted mark used to check the "roundness" of the tyre. But I had a tyre dealer contact me with a far more feasible answer. The same tyre is often made with slightly tweaked specifications for different vehicles. To easily identify these same labelled tyres when they are warehoused or in storage, different markings and stripes are used. Sometimes stripes are added for huge bulk orders to various manufactures. Eg All the red outside stripes are for Toyota next week. This gives anyone in the warehouse a very quick visual check of the different types of tyres without needing to pull them all down and read the sidewall on each one.
As well as the colour, the actual position of the lines is something to take note of too. They're a measure of something called runout. Depending on how the belts are laid on the tyre during manufacturing, they can cause the tire to "run out" - to not track perfectly straight, but pull to the left or right. The closer to the centre of the tyre that these lines are, the less runout the tyre has and the straighter it will track when mounted on your car. So for example, if you were looking at your car from the front and you saw the coloured striped running around the right side of both your front tyres, the car would likely have a tendency to pull to that side. The best thing is to have the coloured stripes on opposite sides of the tyres for opposite sides of the car, so that the runout on each side will counteract the other and help maintain a good straight running. This is something that not many tyre fitting places know about or take any notice of. The obvious solution to having the stripes both on one side is to flip one of the tyres around, but that will only work if they're not unidirectional tyres. If they are unidirectional (and thus must be mounted to rotate a specific way) then you should try to find another tyre from the same batch with the stripe on the opposite side.
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See also the above website under "Colored dots and stripes -- whats that all aboiut?". By the way, I found that that for my car, the tyre mechanic took the above runout stripes into account (and also the yellow dot, which affects balancing).
To summarize, just let the tyres run in a little for 2000 kms or so and then evaluate. What the above quote illustrates is that a pull to the left or right need not necessarily be due to an alignment problem. The only sure way to conclude there is an alignment problem is when you observe uneven wear on the tyres.