Just got a some new tires and an alignment done. Our old rear driver's side tire had uneven wear and I'm afraid it may happen again. For a while it had a slow leak I was unaware of. I also changed the rear struts before installing the new tires. Attached are the numbers from Firestone. I'm thinking of maybe installing a shim but I'm not sure how long that would take and if it's worth it with these numbers. Any thoughts?
They make a shim or shims that go there You do want your alignment to be right I think it is on all my cars I don't know if there's any shims in the back or not I don't sit there with my alignment guy and go over all that stuff every time it goes in for an alignment which is every two or three sets of tires they don't align it every time because they just don't The tire wears boringly the same every time I don't even do a lot of tire rotation to be honest about it with you I buy cheap tires and they last a little longer than they should and that's that. But as far as I know no alignment problems and everything works well and I like to keep the alignment that way I don't like the tires wearing on the outer inner edges and all that kind of stuff just shreds up your tires really prematurely no matter what they cost.
Is it worth it? Does the car feel/ drive straight? Any brake wear, rotor, or hub issues? What is the cost of one tire, and how long does that out-of-alignment spec tire last before replacement versus the cost of shim parts and all? One answer to your question can be based on dollars/ budget. The second, is driveability "feel". Lastly, you knowing it is out of spec, perhaps an OCD mindset. Me? I would align. Good luck with your decision.
Usually a shim installed in the rear and the alignment done is not that bad A lot of times the place has the shims places like specialty products manufacture all of these alignment parts and a lot of this stuff is kept in stock at a lot of alignment shops so there's always that they don't have to disassemble the whole car to put the shim in or anything like that.
Was the car ever in an accident? Bend the body a little and it becomes really difficult to get the alignment right. We had a Protege5 that kept messing up tires, and the eventual solution was to install a crash bolt at one of the rear wheels, since there wasn't enough adjustment built into the car to handle the discrepancy. After that tire wear was normal. In short, do what you have to do to get the alignment back within specs.
