Quote:
Originally Posted by classicman
What if you drive contantly over speed bumps or hit potholes??? Both these things and many more can affect your alignment, and thust tire and brake wear.
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Your many replies do not contradict what I posted. For example, take wheel alignment. If potholes, etc change alignment on a properly designed car, then bent parts must be replaced. Wheel alignment would only cure symptoms. You would, instead, align to bent parts? That dirty little secret is ignored by those who advocate wheel align every year. If potholes change wheel alignment on an engineer designed car, then bent parts must first be replaced. Of course, this means buying a patriotic vehicle (American or foreign manufacturer labels say nothing about patriotic).
My 1980 Accord did 107,000 miles on its original tires. It was never wheel aligned. Why did I learn this? I even began doing my own alignment after my GM product would eat tires and the repair shop left me doubtful. Eventually discovered why it ate tires every 40,000 miles (with help from some honest mechanics and what I then learned by owning a Honda). Alignment was not changing. How wheels attached to the vehicle was causing excessive tire wear. Only myth purveyors were, instead, blaming pot holes - a universal myth.
Defective designed cars did not bother to put mounting holes in the same place on every car. A 'cost controlled' designer solved that defect by, instead, installing adjusters. Cars designed by engineers now spend more money on better designs so that the hole is exact every time and so that the total vehicle cost is less. No adjuster means no variation; no movement due to potholes.
One need not be a car guy to learn facts. Those adjusters for camber and caster do not exist on a car manufactured by patriots. How do you know? Amazingly, even simple arithmetic ballpark identifies a patriotic vehicle. Horsepower divided by liters - an engine parameter - is often associated with vehicles that also don't need wheel alignment. The minimum number should be well known here by all.
Well this may be far too much Cloud. But facts remains, all that checking is necessary for defective vehicles. Properly designed vehicles require very little maintenance - and no repeated checking.
Tune up? Tune ups do not identify a defective rotor. However simple facts such as miles per gallon and engine knocking (noise) would tend to identify such problems. Also obvious would be fluid leaks where the car parks. There is no reason for any fluid leaking beneath any car.
Again, simple observations make all that checking irrelevant. Learning to perform the simplest of task - ie checking tire pressure - eventually means one only looks at the tire to know. Even a full service gas jockey typically could not tell.
Let's not forget another myth promoted by a lying company - Firestone - now called Bridgestone. Low tire pressure does not cause tire failure. Low tire pressure can aggravate a problem directly traceable to defectively designed tires. All those Explorer rollovers are directly traceable to a company that, instead, lied. And lied repeatedly while their defective design was killing people. Who did the exact same thing in the late 1970s (find referenced to Firestone 500). Low tire pressure did not cause tires to be missing one ply or to be glued defectively.
How many knew what caused Ford Explorer rollovers? How many knew that when Ford Motor finally discovered these Firestone (Bridgestone) lies, then Ford demanded Firestone withdrawal all ATX Wilderness tires. Firestone refused. So Ford - a more patriotic company - spent $2billion to replace Firestones 'defective by design' tires. Firestone did what any MBA dominated company would do.
To mask their lies, Firestone changed the brand names to Bridgestone. A point made so that you can decide to be patriotic: either avoid Bridgestone products or so hate humanity as to buy their products. They did in the 1990s what they also did to create Firestone paraplegics and quadriplegics in the late 1970s. Will doing repeated checks (also called inspection) avoid that which more often creates failures? Of course not. Any factory that has no quality also hase quality control inspectors. But then you might blame yourself for the failures rather than the MBA who intentionally created that failure.
These stories are not universally learned. These details are often found in later (back page) newspaper stories - the dirty little details with numbers that cause so many eyes to glaze over. Automotive maintenance is also about warnings for worst case conditions; assumes no one learns (from experience) how to see a low pressure tire.
One need only learn to look at tires - to identify in but a second the tire that needs air (or more likely has a nail because a properly inflated and designed tire remains properly inflated for years). One gains that experience by first taking simple numbers with a $3 pressure gauge. One learns from experience - which means the simplest of numbers and no glazed over eyes.