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Car Pulls After Alignment: Caster Issue?

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Old Aug 14, 2004 | 03:24 AM
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BQuicksilver
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Default Car Pulls After Alignment: Caster Issue?

Okay, here's the background, I lowered the car 0.8 inch and added 255 and 295 kumho MX tires, so I went for alignment. The guys were friends and put a ton of effort into hitting my numbers (charged $50 for 2 hours), so lets not assume operator error/bad shop. This was done on a Hunter 7000? and I have before/after printouts. I sat in the car during the alignment.

The rear was somewhat off, but the only big change was going from 0.24 total toe to 0.08 afterwards, I also added a hair of negative camber.

The big question was the front. Here are the before followed by after numbers:

LF Camber: -0.9 to -0.4
RF Camber: -0.5 to -0.3
Total Toe: 0.36 to 0.07 (was equal on each side before and after)
LF Caster: 7.7 to 6.6
RF Caster: 4.2 to 5.2 (way off)

So we can all see the right front caster is the likely culprit. I did spin hard off the road about 2 years ago when driving hard and seeing a guy nearly take me out after running a light. I only noticed paint scratches and rim damage at the time. The car has NEVER pulled, even with my before specs as far off as they were. The guys tried to get the RF caster within limits, but they said they simply couldn't.

Now the car has a pull to the left, not awful, but I can't ever let go of the wheel safely. Can anyone explain why I now have a left pull even though the post alignment caster numbers are FAR better than the pre-alignment numbers?
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