[200q20v] Wheels, tramlining, and alignments (again and again)

[Edward J Kellock]

Yup.

I went from 205-60-15's to 225-60-15's on my '91 Avant
Noticed a definite decrease in mileage on the highway.

Ed
Colorado Springs

On Wed, 14 Mar 2001 14:03:59 -0800 "Derek Pulvino" <DPulvino at agraus.com>
writes:
> Hey all,
> 
> Has anybody else seen changes in gas mileage related to running 
> bigger wheels and tires?  I've always heard about that happening, 
> but always thought that happened to some other guy.  
> 
> And some more info on my tramlining situation, got the local shop to 
> realign the car, and it did get better, but still not up to par.  
> When I took the car back down for a realignment, I was sure to give 
> them the page out of the Bentley with the appropriate alignment 
> numbers for my vehicle, but the knucklehead completely ignored them. 
>  At this point in time, if anybody else is in the Seattle Metro 
> area, I'm going recommend that you stay away from this shop (Clarks 
> Alignment in Kirkland) unless I can get them to align the car to 
> factory specs once and for all.  
> 
> The main reason they sighted for not using the specs I gave them was 
> the numbers in their alignemnt machine (whatever the hell name it 
> was, but it was expensive so it must be right) didn't agree with 
> what I gave them.  In their favor however, they did do a very good 
> job getting the car to exactly the numbers their machine gave them, 
> but were completely uncommunicative, and non-responsive to any input 
> suggesting they might be wrong.  
> 
> Doing the math, I figured the specs they gave and used (talking toe 
> here) are at the very low side of the toe numbers (least negative 
> number).  Previous alignment had the car set up with slight toe out 
> (total toe -0.04) which was at the edge of their range, second 
> alignment brought exactly on their toe numbers, slight toe in 
> (0.04).  This did improve the driving, but it's still not there.
> 
> I've also checked my ball joints, (look good), and my rack preload 
> (this did make a difference, it was a little loose); both do not 
> appear to present problems.  Long and the short of it, I'm thinking 
> our cars are very sensitive to alignment settings, and need to be 
> spot on the specs for best driving, not half-crappy assed with in 
> the range, but on the money!  A read of the past postings within the 
> audifans website concerning alignments suggested the same thing. 
> 
> How sweet it is.
> 
> Derek P     
> 
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