Both tires only have a few thousand miles on them and look brand new.
Unfortunately they have had to drive around in a clunky incompetently
repaired car their short lives. In any case, the drift was very small and
probably not perceptible to most people. The shop was just trying to sweat
the details after hearing my story. By the way the car is gorgeous. I had
it detailed and I had Colors on Parade (a car paint franchise) re-do some
body work because the clear coating at one edge of a previous repair was had
chipped off. They did a great job. Car exterior looks like new. Hopefully
it ships to my in-laws next week.


"Bill Putney" > wrote in message
...
> Art wrote:
>
>> For those paying attention, after getting the clunk fixed (turned out to
>> be a inner tie rod bushing), the more competent dealer left the steering
>> wheel crooked. So I took it to Merchant's tire, etc store after
>> checking with them that they would listen to my concerns about doing the
>> alignment correctly (as described by Bill, Steve and others here). So I
>> printed out the advice previously posted here, highlighted the important
>> stuff and took the car over.
>>
>> They said they understood the issue and only a moron would do it wrong
>> and they weren't morons. In any case they did the alignment and took a
>> road test. The front end was indeed off, according to them and after
>> they aligned it, the car drifted slightly so they brought it back in and
>> switched front wheels and that solved the problem. Car is now properly
>> aligned, steering wheel is straight and the car tracks straight.
>>
>> By the way they said that they fix a clunk once per month in their shop
>> in these cars caused by bad bushing in the left inner tie rod. In their
>> opinion it is being cooked by exhaust heat because a pipe is too close
>> to it. I haven't heard that theory before. One of the guys owns an
>> Intrepid. At 50k miles he replaced the steering rack. It now has 100k
>> miles on it and nothing else has gone bad on it except for the weather
>> stripping. I told him Bill's suggestion of cutting the weather stripping
>> and buying one additional piece for splicing.
>
> Glad you got some results. Others have responded about the implications
> of swapping the tires to get it to go straight, so I won't say anything
> about that (other than to point out that sometimes the *only* way to
> *really* get things right is to get new tires *and* a proper alignment and
> all the kinks worked out at that point in time - by the time a bad
> alignment is straightened out, the tires may develop bad wear patterns so
> that no matter how good the subsequent alignment is, things are still not
> ideal until new tires are put on and a good alignment repeated - I guess I
> said my piece after all).
>
> Bill Putney
> (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address
> with the letter 'x')