E-News

Receive our e-newsletter for discounts, trackdays and more.

4 Wheel Alignment

Often over looked, very often confused with “tracking” and all too often done incorrectly. Wheel alignment is the direction your wheels are pointing in relative to the centre line of the car.

Why is it important? There are many reasons to have it checked and made sure its all correctly adjusted.

Firstly: safety. If the alignment is not correct, the cars handling can be adversely affected, quite often the ASC/DSC (Automatic Stability Control / Dynamic Stability Control) light will flash on much more often than it should.

Fuel economy: with the tyres out of alignment they will be fighting to go in any direction except in the direction you want. This will cause greater fuel consumption, almost like driving with your foot rested on the brake pedal.

The obvious one, tyre wear: With a set of tyres costing from £400 to sums in excess of £1000 for a set it makes economical sense to make sure your alignment is correct to minimise tyre wear and prolong tyre life.

Gone are the days where you can place a pair of tracking gauges to the front wheels of the car, have the toe adjusted and consider it done. Doing that will only set the front wheels correct with each other and will have no bearing in relation to the back wheels or the centre line of the vehicle. To do it correctly the car needs to have the ride height set to manufacturer’s specification; this is normally done by adding weight to the car until the car sits correctly. The targets are then carefully attached to the wheels and the alignment process begins.

Our alignment machine is a Hunter DSP600 Visualiner the same as the BMW approved KDS systems which main dealers use. It has 4 independent and state-of-the-art pillar-mounted cameras which are able to recognise the target boards we place on the wheels. This enables the computer to build up a 3D image of the cars alignment, and then we can correctly check and adjust all variables where the manufacturer allows, normally: rear camber, rear toe, front camber and front toe. Full before and after printouts are available too, so you can see just what was wrong; and how we put it right. It is possible in some cases that a non-adjustable part can be causing interference with a cars alignment. For example, front camber is the cause of many issues if the suspension has been modified in some way, but we can supply an adjustable replacement part so the car can be set up correctly and drive how it was intended too.

Please contact us to book your BMW in for alignment.

© 2010 Bexley Motor Works | Site Map | Resources | Website Design by Sixth Sense ESP