Just had the wheels aligned and the dash cam was running. Fascinating process - but not for the guy doing it. He looked tired or bored.
Did not get a report of how the wheels were aligned or what they were finally set to. So here is a still shot of the computer display...
Anyone want to speculate on what the sliders under the green and red bars indicate??



I thought the rear wheels could not be adjusted without shims, so was the fix solely to the right front?
The car was raised beyond the computer screen so I have no view of what was done.

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Have a higher-res photo?

 

Sorry I don't. It's a small clip out of a larger dashcam pic. Tried blowing it up but it's all a blur.

Did find this video which has a similar display at time index 0:42 - actually a fairly good description, and the equipment looked very similar:


Might be in the same order... Camber, Castor and Toe for the front and Castor & Toe for the rear... top to bottom???
Perhaps they reversed the camber and castor order as castor seems unlikely for the rear???

Just trying to figure out what was wrong and how the machine works
To me it looks like it picked the left front wheel to be zero and measured the
rest relative to that, rather than the car body - but it is all a mystery to me.

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Front is camber, castor and toe
Rear is camber and toe

Rear is not adjustable without shims so they didn't do anything to it. Ride height will affect the rear due to the rear swing beam design but if you aren't lowered a lot it's doesn't change it much.

All the measurements are done relative to the machine zero reference.

Front left is within spec so they probably didn't have to do anything to it, though hopefully they pulled out some of the camber.
Front right the toe is out of spec, I'm guessing you were pulling slightly to the right and chewing up tires a bit more on that side.

Rear left toe is out of spec and the camber is weirdly close to zero. Should be about -1 degree in the rear like the other side. Are you lowered or carrying a lot of weight in the rear? Also betting that the rear left wears faster than the rear right.

Usually the shop should give you a before and after printout, if nothing else so they can 'show' you what they fixed.

 

Thanks Greg S, good info.
The car is stock and the tires were wearing on the inside tread ring only, on all 4. Some more than the others. On the best tire it was barely noticeable, right front.
I was doing regular tire rotations front to rear every 5K when doing an oil change, so I'm sure the wear got spread around.

The wear was odd, rather than just scuffing off the whole ring of tread it became rippled in a non uniform way, so that when you ran you hand over the inner tread, you could
feel that it was no longer circular. It would vary up and down in some areas almost every 2 tread blocks.
This caused the tires to growl. We replaced the worst one when we were in Michigan and that eased the noise a lot, so I just replaced the rest when we got back to Arizona.

There was a slight pull to the right, but I couldn't tell if it was alignment or just road camber. I think it has been out of alignment from new, got 70K on it now.
They did not give me anything but the bill - just said it was off and is now fixed.

Just started putting my own tires on too - couldn't figure out how to use the Harbor Freight install tool,
but fortunately I have tire levers from doing motorbike tires, so they went on pretty easy actually.


Fun - when you are only doing it once in a blue moon.

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heh, heh, I gave up on HF tyre changer too. Some spoon levers and they go on just fine.