What Does Your Tire Wear Tell You?
Your best indicator on how your alignment is doing is by your tire wear. Any bald spot, feathering, cupping, or any other weird looking wear pattern will indicate that your alignment is going out and that you need to take it in to get it back into alignment. So, here are some bad wear indicators to tell you what needs improvement or fixing.
The first things to look at are the center and edges of your tires. If the entire center or both edges are worn out, those are indicators of bad tire inflation. Center only wear indicates over inflation while wear on both edges will indicate under inflation.
You may even notice an odd discoloration on the sidewall or cracking in the tread that isn’t from dry rot with under inflation, which will require you to have the tire taken off of the rim and inspect for sidewall damage. You’ll have to replace the tire if there is any.
Camber wear is indicated by edge wearing at the far ends of the tires near the sidewalls. If the inside edge is worn down and nothing in the center, you have too much negative camber. All outside wear will indicate positive camber.
However, if the edge and center of the tire has worn down, you possibly have a toe issue. Inside wear will indicate too much toe out, while outside wear indicates too much toe in.
Cupping can indicate an issue of bad shocks, bad balance, or a worn ball-joint. Usually a worn ball-joint will be more to one side than on the entire wheel.
If you notice that the front of the tread blocks are higher or lower than the rear, then you have either not rotated your tires in a while, you have under inflated or over loaded them, or you’ve been doing some fast braking and acceleration.