Answer this puzzler

Car pulls hard to right. Front wheels switched left-to-right and
right-to-left. Now car pulls hard to left.

When fronts are rotated to rear, car is neutral.

This tells me the pull was not due to misalignment, but due to tires
themselves. How can tires make such a difference?

Chrysler shop manual devotes an entire page to "car lead" and its
correction. It address the significance of pronounced influence of tires
to this problem.

I frankly don't know how tires can cause major turning tendencies but they
can and do. Knowing this all the more puzzles me why there is not a
provision for the driver to neutralize these pulling tendencies other than
by constantly inputing counteracting steering wheel forces. Anybody who
drives knows how much better it is when the car is "neutral" in directional
stability.

While it has been suggested that a servo adjustable (opposite and equal)
wheel camber might do the trick, there might also be electronic solutions
utilizing miniature directional gyros as seen in the Segway machines.
Whatever method is selected, its time has come to allow driver fine-tuning
of the steering system to totally eliminate vehicle lead, regardless of
road, tire, and wind conditions, or suspension discrepancies.

 

A trick I had learned is to remove the tire from the rim and flip it over so
the back of the tire is now the front. You can only do this with
non-directional tires. My wife's Shadow SE use to do this with her first
set of Eagle GTs I just flipped the tire and it fixed the problem.

 

A trick I had learned is to remove the tire from the rim and flip it over so
the back of the tire is now the front. You can only do this with
non-directional tires. My wife's Shadow SE use to do this with her first
set of Eagle GTs I just flipped the tire and it fixed the problem.

 

Would you not need two of these things?? Just in case one went bad, you'd
have a back up already in place. Much like the fuel pumps you like to bitch
about.

Denny

 

Tires, espically cheap ones, sometimes have rubber that isn't a uniform
density. As a result, in your case the tire on the side that the car pulls
to has a smaller diameter than the other tire since it's worn down faster.
You can also have different regions of the tire wear faster due to the
same problem.

Ted

 

Swapping the tires from one side to the other should immeidately
pinpoint if the tires themselves are causing a pulling problem for
whatever reason.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
adddress with the letter 'x')

 

....then along comes som idiot, who adjusts his/her car incorrectly and
"leads" it right into either the median or ditch. Voila - instant lawsuit!
Ain't America great?