My mother in law has a '99 Honda Civic. A couple of years ago I replaced one outer tie rod end. I knew the alignment was a bit off afterwards, but she drives very seldom so it was left alone. Both at the time of replacement and currently, the straight ahead steering position causes the wheel to be turned a fair bit. ie. the car drives straight at 2-oclock. It pulls a bit if you let go of the wheel, but not a crazy amount, I've driven cars with more severe pull. Today it was taken in for an alignment. Apparently the one wheel has toe of something crazy like 11 degrees. The person at this 1-man shop indicated the car could not be aligned because the tie rod end was at the already at the maximum level adjustment. I looked at it with him and he's right, it cannot be screwed in any further. My (poor) recollection from the time of replacement was that the tie rod end was not at the maximum adjustment. I certainly cannot rule out poor workmanship on my part, but I honestly can't think of how I could have caused this problem.
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I would be grateful for any and all ideas as to the cause of this problem.
You need to look over under the car and see if anything is bent. That much toe out would be caused by something very obvious but since the shop didn't say that's the problem you need to look again yourself.
I suggest that you set the car up so that the one good wheel is pointed straight ahead. Now turn the wheel to the left all the way and than back to center, now to the right. Count the number of turns it takes to accomplish both operations. My guess is that the number won't be the same. What you may need to do is toe the good wheel in but until you get the results I can't say for sure
I have had to deal with this kind of thing in the past when doing alignments. Unless there is obvious damage to the car or a possible loose subframe your car needs what I call a “do over” alignment.
Basicly you are starting over. Completely disconnect the tie rods from the spindles. Center the RACK not the wheel. Then look to see if the wheel is strait. If it is out by more that say 10 or 15 degrees lock the rack at the center and adjust the wheel to be as close as possible. This can sometimes be done at the wheel but more often than not I do it where the column connects to the rack. This is easier than dealing with airbags and stuff. Once that is done set the wheels to the correct alignment and then adjust the disconnected tie rod ends to go back in to the spindles. 99.9 percent of the time this fixes the problem. My assumption as to how this happens is that someone in the past replaced front end parts and assumed that the wheel was centered to the rack and made the corrections with the tie rod ends when in fact the rack was not centered.
The only other way I can see this happening is if a alignment was being done and it was done with the wheel 180 out and corrected it by adjusting the wheel or where the shaft attaches to the rack.
Oh and if the place that you went to had a fixed price for an alignment I don’t blame them for bailing. It will take some time to sort it out and is way beyond the scope of a normal alignment. What they were really saying was sort out and reset your steering and then come and get an alignment.
The shop definitely wanted to do a "toe 'n' go" alignment. I agree with the idea of resetting everything to center. When I did a bunch of front end work on my Fairmont (up to and including changing the K-member), everything was all sorts of wonky. The inside of the wheel would scrape the lower control arm on the left side, but not the right. I had to find the center of the rack travel and make sure the rack was centered in the car before I set the toe. Not that it would ever be noticed on some cars, but the rack not being in the center of its travel could cause some interesting bumpsteer issues.
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Thanks guys, I'll give these ideas a try and report back in a few days or so.
I'm now really wondering if it is the wrong part, I'll measure to confirm. I didn't notice anything bent, but I'll do a careful re-examination. I'll do the wheel turn test. If everything seems okay I'll try to do the reset alignment the best I can and then take it to another shop. It was a fixed price alignment (and inexpensive), but they didn't end up charging. As I suggested, it's entirely possible I messed stuff up, but the one wheel wasn't touched and is good-ish.
I'm pretty sure that threading out the tie rod end increases toe out.
Final update on this: I worked on the car again a few weeks ago and solved the issue. Thank you for all of your help.
1. I did the "reset alignment." I suspect what happened the first time is that I unintentionally pulled on the tie rod when I was screwing on the one end. It takes very little force to do this and the tie rod on the other side does not move in tandem in this situation. They only move in tandem when the steering wheel is turned. When I screw things on I tend to apply a bit of pressure. The second time I was very careful to only turn the tie rod and not pull as it was spinning.
2. The tie rod looked like it could not thread inwards any further. On closer inspection I realized it was simply covered in road grim in a misleading way and there were additional threads. I cleaned them off with a wire wheel and was able to screw the rod in a bit more. I eyeballed the alignment to get it "close enough" so that a shop would be willing to align it.
3. We had a more reputable shop preform the alignment. It was almost double the cost, but it was the going market rate.
^ Sorry I'll try to be more clear. When a steering wheel is turned one tie rod pulls in, the other pushes out. However, when I yanked on one tie rod when attaching the tie rod end, it didn't appear to move the tie rod/wheel on the other side. I might have moved it 1/4". I know that normally when you move a wheel/tie rod, you get an equal and opposite reaction on the other side. I'm not sure if there was some play in the system. I hope this makes more sense.
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