"Wheel Alignment"

Before the Thanksgiving break I was given the assignment of checking the wheel alignment on a Freightliner truck in our shop. After being previously shown by our instructor, watching some videos and going over "A Common Man's Guide" Me and another student teamed up and began to the Alignment Mastery sheet we had printed out.

The first step was to set the Toe-in on the truck.

After measuring the to see how much we needed to adjust the Toe-in, which turned out to be 1.25 inches





We were then able to adjust the tie rods and get our Toe-in to the proper specification.

We adjusted the tie rods on both sides 5/8 of an inch bring us to what should be a zero angle in the Toe-in.







After getting the steering axle adjusted we then moved on to checking and setting the thrust angle on both the forward drive axle and the rear drive axle.

Once realizing that the thrust angle was off about half an inch, we were able to get underneath and adjust the angle back to zero.

This assignment was pretty simple, however before the lesson in the shop and the discussions with my peers about wheel alignments. It would have been much more time consuming and frustrating to do this assignment. This was my first wheel adjustment on a heavy duty truck and most of what I learned was fairly new, especially getting down and turning the wrenches and making the adjustment. This was an awesome little assignment and has taught me that without to much difficulty I can perform or help perform a wheel alignment and know what a thrustline is and how to tell if it is true along with a lot more I wasn't to sure about before.

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