About South Croydon tyres and service centre

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Four wheel alignment, believe it or not, is a process to ensure all four wheels are correctly aligned. You may have heard of it being called wheel tracking before, but both are the same.  It’s pretty easy to get your head around – if your tyres aren’t working in tandem together then you’re going to get unevenly worn tyres.

The benefits of perfectly aligned wheels include straight-line stability, improved cornering performance, improved fuel efficiency and steering wheel returnability. It can also improve the life expectancy of your tyres by up to 12,000 miles.

There are a few tell tale signs that you can look out for.

• Unevenly worn tyres. you may notice the outside tread is worn more than the inside
• Shaking sensations through the steering wheel
• Steering pulling off to one side

This is to ensure the direction and angle of each wheel is matching what the car manufacturer has recommended. There are two different settings to check – the toe and camber.

Toe relates to the space between the front and the back of each tyre. Most cars have the wheels ever so slightly turned in, around 0.05°. This allows the wheels to turn as efficiently as possible without the tyres dragging on the road. Toe-in means that the front of the tyres are closer to each other than the rear of the same tyres. Toe-out means that the rear of each tyre is closer to each other than the front.

Camber is about the angle your tyres are sitting at and it measures the degree of tyre tilt. A positive camber is when the top of the wheel leans out from the centre. A negative camber is the opposite so when the wheel is leaning into the centre. Usually, you can expect to see a camber of 0.5 – 2°.