sorry for bad alt text, I lack the terminology to describe this accurately
(i’m not a mechanic, i have no earthly idea if this is accurate. Don’t sue me)
What’s going on with the caster picture? Not sure what it is showing.
Most regular cars won’t have an adjustment and are factory set, but you get into sports cars and after market stuff you can change it.
What it does is controll how hard the car/steering wheel want to point themselves back straight ahead(and a couple other things, but thats the main/most obvious one). All these drawings are way overdramatized to make it easy to see differences in everything that is being talked about. Just a few degrees in caster angle can make a huge difference in how hard it is to turn the steering wheel and how quickly the car will straighten itself if you just let go of the steering wheel.
Pretty much every vehicle you buy now will have a caster angle a bit on the positive side. That way the vehicle always tries to go straight and stable unless you want to turn the wheel. It makes it “more work” to turn, but thanks to power steering that’s not really an issue.
A negative caster would be very unstable feeling and pretty much useless to have on a vehicle.
As far as telling from the picture what caster is, it’s sort of a bad image for showing it. It would have been more intuitive to picture where the strut was mounted to the car body in relation to where the middle of the wheel is. A positive caster will have a strut angled like ( / )--------( l ) if the car was facing to the left.
Is there any reason other than appearance to have your wheels negatively cambered? I see it pretty frequently these days and it just looks stupid and wears out your tires in weird ways.
What’s with those cars that camber their tires all crazy on purpose? Style or is there a functional reason?
Standard street performance is around 1-2 deg negative camber, an experienced eye can tell when looking at the car from the outside but it’s not super obvious. Aggressive track camber is around 3-4 deg, that’s getting a bit more obvious to the naked eye, but still looks fairly normal. The cars you’re talking about with like 10+ deg of camber, where the outside of the tire isn’t even touching the pavement, is just the owners making their car handle like shit and burn through tires every 1000 miles because they think it looks cool.
Crazy negative camber is just a style thing. You can see fairly aggressive/negative camber on racing cars, and on a track it serves a purpose, but even in those cases it usually much milder than what I think you’re referring to .
I remember one time I changed my struts, rotors, pads, and mounted new tires myself. When I was done, I had to drive it about 30 miles to get it aligned. During the drive to the shop, its alignment was “all of the above” in the graphic 😆
0/10 do not recommend.
If you do work like this at home you can often get the alignment close enough for the drive to the alignment shop by taking precise measurements before disassembly, paying attention to the amount of turns on end joints etc…
The best option is still to trailer it to an alignment shop, ofc.
If you’re really careful you can do the whole thing yourself with some string and a yardstick and hand tools. Especially when a lot of cheap cars will only have an adjustable toe angle and only the front of the car.
In my defense, I was going to take it to the shop down the road (~3 miles) but they were backed up for a week.
That’s a good defense :)
Alt text is there to provide all alternative for the visually impaired. A good rule is that it should provide as good of an experience as anyone else would get. Given how complex this image is, a separate text write-up would be more useful, so don’t sweat it.
unaligned
misaligned
Me, I have Multiproblem.
Time before ABS: local wear
Lol if this is that I think it is, I’ve always just called it a “flat spot”
