[wooka]

For chassis alignment does the car have to be pick up off the ground? Cause I'm headed out right now.. Should I go to HASS first or simply to a good denter?

[audioholic]

The alignment machine usually provides caster and set back values also. Check that. I saw this being rectified on a swift in front of my eyes. The strut mounting area itself was bent due to the car hitting a divider at high speed. The aligner pulled out the old strut back to its actual position. Later the strut was replaced with a new one once its castor angle was rectified.

Personally I hate the idea of road side garages trying jugaads to get such things back in place. I have such a garage opposite my house. They correct such faults by tying a chain between the car and a tree, and reverse the car to get it back to shape. Else in such a case they will manually pull it out somehow. I will faint if such work is done on my car, even though how much money I would save by not getting it done professionally.

[wooka]

Mod Note : There are several spelling & grammatical errors in your posts. This negatively affects the forum experience for other readers.

Kindly ensure that you proof-read your posts prior to submission. Also, it would be a good idea to use spell-checkers.

[wooka]

Awesome!

Moving on, the castor values were well within tolerable limits. In fact, near identical, I think 1°23' for both the left and right front struts. The car was lifted off a hydraulic lift further high up for me to inspect everything as well. . Besides a few grease marks I came away happy. Everything is in good shape. The ball joint had broken the day of the accident as I recall now. The mounting bracket, suspension arm etc all seemed to be fine.

The problem is thus - i had one tyre changed that very day - accelere, here comes the pain. I subsequently had the suspension arm changed and the second front tire changed after a camber bolt adjustment. Too late - the damage was done. The tyre guy further increased my toe in during the second front tyre change, to a total of 5° in.

End result - its the accelere I had changed earlier, subjected to a bent suspension arm, poor camber and extreme toe in, paid. The outer tread was marginally more worn out. We inverted this tyre on the same rim and voila, the car has started to pull to the other side ever so slightly.

Finally I've been told to wear out the tyre a bit till it settles down, and my Jk's from the rear have been rotated to the front. All is fine for now. . Thanks a lot for your help, everyone, =)

[cotterpin]

@Turbohead: This unfortunately seems to be a shoddy mechanical anomaly right from the manufacturer.
Two days ago after reading your thread verbatim,I happened to see a Rapid in my office premises waiting to pick up some one.Luckily the car was about to take a turn but was at standstill, I managed to have a look at the inner wall of the tyres.
To my utter disbilief it had the same uneven and rather premature tyre wear.The car was a personal vehicle(atleast from the no. plate) and was comparitively new.
Looking at this my bielief is reinforced that this has to be a crucial manufacturing defect.I think SKODA should take this on warfooting and correct it by initiating a recall.

[autopilotrik]

Hello all. I am a new member. Noting this issue.... Yes it is a hugely common issue with vento/rapid because of relatively high castor that causes camber to change with tyre wear significantly more than several other vehicles...
It is definitely around the 30000 km mark that you will notice that both these cars start wearing the inside of the front tyre and a while later the inside of the rear tyres. It is not per say a design flaw just a slack approach to using an existing setup for a bigger car.
Beware though, even after changing the tyres you will find that damage has been done to the suspension and housing units to the point that it cannot be fixed easily. You will find a tiny amount of wobble under hard braking, wandering at speeds over 120 kph, wheels becoming misaligned faster.

Suggestion is to keep a watch on the tread wear after replacing tyres and replacement of suspension with fully adjustable one and a strengthening brace(back and front) should keep your vw/skoda running very nice wear patterns for years and kms to come. Enjoy motoring.

[rapid_fire]

Originally Posted by jeeva

Trust me, if not all of them , most of those computerised wheel alignment centres, don't bother to check or report any abnormal camber/castor readings. It's only the toe values that they will be interested in, which can be adjusted easily and its alignment all done!

My previous skoda rapid also had similar issue, inside of the both tyres worn out in 12000 kms, in less than a year. I also had checked alignment 2 times before (at 5k ans 10k kms), and was said to be normal. I took the car to service center, and they found out that it had a bend in its rear axile
!. I never had any major accident, but the service center guys were not ready accept it as a manufacturing defect, and was putting all blame in bad roads and rash driving (in fact it was my first car and i was looking after the car like my own baby) I was not in a position to fight with them due to pearsonal reasons and i had to pay 15 k for the axile replacement and 9k for tyres.