Tracking: am I being unreasonable?

[Ozzie Osmond]

DELETED: Comment made by a member who's account has been deleted.

1. Centre the steering wheel - otherwise you'll annoy the driver!
2. Centre the rack - otherwise you'll have different "lock" to left and right!
3. Adjust the track rod ends so the wheels are pointing in the right direction - i.e. set correct tracking.

[bungz]

I made a thread on here a week or so ago about the same thing.

Simple things done poorly at my expense boil my P##s

£30 to have my centered wheel sit at 11 straight ahead.

Don't have any confidence it is tracked correctly either.

Will get it done again when I can be bothered.

[brman]

Ozzie Osmond said:

1. Centre the steering wheel - otherwise you'll annoy the driver!
2. Centre the rack - otherwise you'll have different "lock" to left and right!
3. Adjust the track rod ends so the wheels are pointing in the right direction - i.e. set correct tracking.

Just to be pendantic, but it should be 2,1,3.
The starting point being a properly centered rack.
Then, if the wheel is not straight either turn it to straight (for very small errors) or correct it by moving the wheel or UJ (see later).
Then you can adjust the track rod ends to get your tracking right.

Just to add to the moving the steering wheel bit. This needs to be done with care. There are two or three ways a steering wheel can end up wrong with the rack centred.
1) Someone bodged it previously by removing it and refitting it a spline out.
2) Someone bodged it previously when changing a universal joint, again refitting it a spline out
3) Maybe.... the rack is not actually fitted correctly or has been bent out of position. (not so likely but....)
My point between 1 & 2 is they have different fixes. For a simple car it might not matter whether you reset the steering wheel or UJ position but for cars with stuff like column mounted electric power assist it does, because then the position of the column is also important. Less importantly, if your column is not aligned to centre your indicator cancelling will occur at the wrong point.
so really, if you want to be 100% sure
1) center rack
2) center column (if out)
3) center steering wheel (if out)
4) set steering wheel accurately at 12 (there is a good chance the rack center in 1 does not give a truely centered wheel)
4) do tracking.....

Done to death yet?

[Hol]

Nanook said:

Ozzie Osmond said:

Toyoda said:

All this talk of remove the steering wheel is nonsense. The garage are just inept

^^^ This

Ozzie Osmond said:

Hol said:

A decent geometry garage knows that the rack should be in the exact central position before starting to set the tracking. So that neither wheel scrubs at full lock.

^^^ And this.

So which is it?



If they centre the rack and the steering wheel is off centre, how do you sort it?

Somebody has bodged s previous tracking or replacement steering rack figment if the steering isn't straight,

[JumboBeef]

Update:

The car had started to judder under braking, the steering wheel shaking, for a few weeks before all this tracking issue started. Not too bad, the brakes worked fine apart from the slight judder. I lived with it for a few weeks and it went in for an MOT. Passed (after the work already described in the first post was done) no advisories on the brakes which I was pleased at but surprised. Shortly after the MOT the steering wheel started to pull to the right under braking. More accurate to say the car braked in a straight line but the wheel pulled itself straight under braking, and then the top of the wheel would go back to 11 o'clock with foot off the brakes.

I booked it into a garage as this was most definitely not right. The garage found the offside wishbone 'completely knackered' and the nearside not much better.

Both replaced, now no judder and the steering wheel is now straight

Edited by JumboBeef on Sunday 23 October 21:54