Honda Civic 2 tracking ?

[Pat Pending]

Sometimes driving mostly on roads with a heavy camber can cause uneven tyre wear on cars with no other obvious tracking fault (offside front).

If you can beg/borrow/steal an infrared thermometer, it will show up uneven temperature gradient on a tyre that has only slight mistracking, a thermal camera is even better, I have a Flir that I use for checking for high resistance joints in electrical panels and distribution equipment, that is useful for mechanical/automotive diagnosis as well.
Andy.

[Murphyv310]

Not so sure I'd agree. The loading would be on the outside of the nearside tyres. More noticabke on the front due to engine weight and it n cars with fully independent rear suspension, not those with beam axles or torsion beams.

[Pat Pending]

I've had the same as I described. The explantion was that you tend to be steering toward the centre of the road to compensate, slightly more toe-in was suggested as the cars steering geometry was OK, it did cure the problem.

Of course, if on your usual journey you have to turn right onto a fast road and give it some "beans" day in and day out, even with ASR/traction control, you can put a tyre into a wear pattern, and not notice.

Another thing, is the tyre can go out of shape causing uneven wear, also something I've had experience of.

Once a tyre has started to wear unevenly it's hard to stop it. Years ago I owned a Triumph 2500PI that you had to turn the rear tyres round on the rims to get any kind of life out of them at all.

Andy.

[Murphyv310]

That's one thing for sure, once the wear starts its always going to be there. Some independent rear suspension set ups have negative camber and the tyre wear is on the inside. The old swing axle beetle and rear engined Skoda had positive camber, this lead to tuck under on fast cornering especially if you lifted off, most inexperienced drivers couldn't cope with the sudden resultant oversteer and the car would spin, on these the outer part of the tyre wore first.

[Pat Pending]

Another Triumph, the Herald, (and Vitesse), used to be prone to that, if you chickened out on a corner at speed, it was over the hedge you would go!

[boater sam]

1 front tyre wearing on the inside is not just tracking error, you would have an uneven wear pattern on the other front tyre as well, maybe not as pronounced. Simple excessive toe out would be symmetrical wear on both front wheels.
Front wheel drive cars have small toe out angles when correctly set to compensate for suspension wind up under power.

Odd one  wheel wear patterns are due to castor, camber and king pin inclination errors usually due to mechanical damage or worn steering joints or defective rubber mountings.

You need a full front end geometry check and inspection for damage/wear not just tracking. Unless you want to be wearing tyres out prematurely. 

Most so called experts in my experience couldn't track a unicycle. When we used to prepare race and rally cars with fully adjustable front and back geometry, steering geometry checks would take about 3 hours on a laser jig.

If they can't find any errors, retain the tyre, it could just be defective.

[Radio Fixer]

Thanks for more replies.

"If they can't find any errors, retain the tyre, it could just be defective. " Are they likely to admit to not finding anything? Rather think not. Is it dangerous to drive with a worn tyre on one edge? Don't like the idea myself, not much in contact with the road even with perfect tyres is there.

One thing I didn't mention was that all tyres were allowed to go about 5 psi low (red face). Once you have the electronics that measures that you haven't got one low pressure tyre its easy to forget about checking, well for me anyway. Of course if they all go slowly low together that isn't picked up by the electronics as I understand it to work by comparison. But the car is 60% of the time with just the driver and the rest mainly one passenger so maybe this wasn't the damaging cause. Anyway it wouldn't account for just one wheel I think.

"Most so called experts in my experience couldn't track a unicycle. " That is the big worry and no way around it, even the Honda dealers don't have the laser kit and its doubtful they would be better than somewhere like Elite, if they had, who are set up for it and doing it all the time.

thanks Gary

[Mark Hennessy]

Most so called experts in my experience couldn't track a unicycle.

Lol

I had something similar with my Focus. First I noticed what sounded like a duff bearing coming from the back, and at the time, Honest John mentioned possible problems with rear wheel bearings. As the car was approaching its 3rd birthday (3 year warranty at the time), I tried flagging it with the garage (a very good one, it has to be said), but they weren't sure they could hear anything, and couldn't find any play, etc, with the bearing...

Shortly afterwards, another garage did its first MOT (I was between Norfolk and Worcestershire at that point), and found uneven wear on the tyre. This was strange - it was wear that varied with rotation around the tyre. So you could look from behind the car and it would look absolutely fine, but push the car forward a few inches to reveal a new bit of tyre and the inside inch had no tread at all!

No-one could come up with an explanation for that. No professionals, nor none of the enthusiasts. The internet was no help either. All we could do was put it down to a faulty tyre. A replacement cured it, and I wasn't too unhappy because the original Firestones were really noisy compared to the Pirelli P6000s that I'd already put on the front.

But after a few months, that same corner started to get noisy again. I couldn't detect a wear pattern yet, but by this time, I'd bought myself an infra-red thermometer, and could see that the same inside edge of the tyre was some 15-20 degrees warmer than the rest of the tyre after a drive. The other tyres were pretty constant across their width.

So armed with that information I rushed off to the local Ford dealer, who dismissed me as some sort of eccentric nutter. Despite explaining everything clearly, they just didn't understand the point I was trying to make - or didn't have the necessary equipment and expertise to check it out.

A local tyre specialist did the honours, and as expected, found that a substantial adjustment was needed on that corner (I didn't give them much detail when arriving - I wanted to see what they found with no prompting. Top marks!). Don't ask for more detail - this was more than 10 years ago. Suffice to say, the Focus has a complicated rear suspension setup for its time, and there are adjustments. I still have the car, and it's been fine every since. The handling is still up there with the modern cars.

So, you might need to persevere until you find a place that understands what they're doing. Based on my experience, that wouldn't be a main dealer, and it certainly wouldn't be any of the fast-fit chains. But a local specialist did the trick for me.

Good luck!


PS: I wouldn't worry about 5PSI.

[boater sam]

I was considering retaining the tyre to claim it on the manufacturer! On no account use it on the road. Besides being illegal tread wise, it has been stressed to have worn oddly, the carcass could well be compromised.
Some of the best technicians are in the big tyre distributors, definitely not the fast fix easy job sheds which tend to be youngsters with a gas axe fitting silencers.
An AA or RAC recommendation is still a good clue to conscientious work.

[boater sam]

Hi, Mark. Still cabbing around in that Focus then?

Odd tread block wear is the result of misalignment. It starts when the tyre is new with full tread. Due to the distortion of the tread, the tread blocks move out of line under load and actually skip on the road surface, causing premature wear. Once the wear pattern is established it continues until the tyre is like an old 3p bit with regular spaced flat spots both around and across the tread area.

Is there a tyre manufactures workshop near you Gary? Or a national distributor chain? National Tyres?