Quote:
Originally Posted by rkracing
Been reading a lot of interesting stuff here on the forum regarding
improving class-C E450 motorhome steering & handling.
https://www.forestriverforums.com/fo...ml#post2510044
Sure make a lot of sense to me. I had mine checked and it only had
4* caster. I talked to my local chassis suspension guy about it and he
warned me that the offset sleeves add additional load & wear to the
ball joint because you are changing the angle. Especially the 3 1/2*
sleeve I'd like to try. Anybody here done it and had early ball joint
failure??? Any chassis experts confirm this may happen?
Tired of windy wondering Rich |
...
Rich,
I took a look at the other thread and I'm pretty sure the guy's merely got a toed-out error setting on his unit. It can happen right from the factory and apparently can be hard to catch. That is why his tires scrub off on the inside and just about the only reason they ever do. That error may not seem possible because the alignment shop re-did it a couple of times with the same result, but I'll tell you a horror story why I believe that the toe setting is still the culprit.
In 1976, I bought a new K5 Chevy 4wd pick-up to deal with a chronically muddy tract-home project I had contracted. I specifically selected a 1/2 ton pick-up that already had mud & snow tires on it over all other specs.
With less than 10k miles on it, the new tires on my new truck were nearly down to the cords on the inside. There had to be something wrong with the alignment. I went to Montgomery Wards for new tires and asked for an alignment. They put the new tires on and told me the alignment was OK as was. The alignment should have been ok, because the truck was new from the GM factory.
Wards had just installed a new "computer controlled" alignment machine. I objected that the tires wore bad on the inside and their new machine couldn't be correct. After I called their new baby ugly like that, their "alignment expert" told me the camber had to be off and I would have to find a different shop to "bend" the yokes on my straight front axle for a camber correction.!?? Dumbest thing I ever heard.
Thereafter, watching the tires like a hawk, I noticed the same problem developing. I took the truck to the Chevy dealer and they told me that the alignment was ok and I was probably getting bad tires. So I took the truck to a local, highly regarded frame alignment shop and had him align it. He said the alignment was ok as is.
Frustrated, I took the truck home, jacked it up in my driveway and discovered that a stone-simple measurement, using just an ordinary tape measure, gave me quite a difference between the track-width in front vs the same track-width in back of the tire. I held a ball-point pen against a tread rib, spun the wheel and made a perfect thin line to measure from. The tires were obviously very much toed out in front.
The recommended setting was actually supposed to be neutral on this truck, not toed-in as most front steering back then, because the truck had full-time full wheel drive. Pull-torque on the front truck axle would normally cause the front to toe-in from stress. FWD cars are now set toed in front out for this same reason.
I re-adjusted the toe setting to a very slight toe-in, replaced the worn tires maybe 20k down the road and the third set was on there and wore just fine when I sold the truck at around 77k miles.
To top it off, my truck never steered so good as it did after the adjustment. It was a little grabby before the correction. I have no idea why all the alignment machines screwed up, but it must be a common kink in them somewhere. I would recommend anybody who sells alignments to double check their work by hand on occasion or in a troublesome case.
Camber make hardly any difference providing it is the same on both wheels and I imagine excess caster does stress steering because the vehicle has to fight it to turn. Toe settings are very important and that even includes that all our RV trailer axles are in line. There are apparently some commercial trailer shops that do this.
Another point is that autocross racers sometimes set their front steering to be toed out on purpose, as the grabiness seems to make for quicker steering. Some autocross are also cambered out on the bottom to load the front outside tire-tread flatter when turning.
From an RV aspect, if wind loads the down-wind tires more, and the steering is toed-out, the RV is likely to dart to the down-wind side more because the tire with the most traction wins. A correct toe-in setting will save a lot of that nuisance.
Finally, all new trucks seem to have stiff ball joints until they break-in, some worse than others. This can overcome normal slight caster and cause the steering to stick, instead of self-centering, pointing in whatever direction it was last aimed, whether from steering input or the previous road-bump. New RV's might need extra driving steering correction until the joints loosen up a bit. This is something I actually measured with a scale and I've also read it online as a Ford TSB.
Wes
)
Big tires would make it all worse.
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