Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Troubleshooting Alignment/Tire Problem

I purchased new tires last year (Kuhmo). Part way through the summer I noticed that they were not wearing evenly so I took it in and found out that my alignment was out. I switched the tires around and had the alignment done. It was fine for the rest of the year. I have recently started to notice that they were doing the same thing again this year. I recently had them balanced and they told me that I should get an alignment done. I have high mileage on my car 177,000 KM. I want to know that would it be possible that something is worn in the front end to cause the alignment to go out like this or is it just the way the car is or could there be something else going on here. Your help is appreciated. My old tires which were the original ones never did this (at least that I noticed anyway).

The front wishbone bushes can wear out at 50K miles (80k kM). This will cause some 'unusual' conditions to appear with the suspension, steering and braking aspects of the car. I beleive it is a common fault on Mondeos/ Contours.

The difficult part of the repair is one bolt is trapped by the gearbox. You can lift the gearbox up a bit or saw the bolt top off and fit a new one.

HTH.

Anyone else have any comments.

Anyone else have any comments?

How are your tires wearing? If the problem is that the inside edge is being worn away, it could be a camber problem.

The left front camber of my '96 SE is at the max negative value for the factory limits and consequently, the inside edge of the front left tire wears more quickly (negative camber means the top of the tire leans inward--sorry if you knew that already).

Unfortunately, the Contour's front suspension is not adjustable with respect to camber.

The only solution is to rotate the tires religiously.

Hope this helps.

You might not have a problem. Once tires start to wear in an unusual pattern, they usually continue to do so even after alignment has been corrected.

Anyone worth his salt doing an alignment knows how to inspect for things that would make the car non alignable, such as worn bushings, tie rod ends, ball joint, etc. You can hope that they looked for such problems.

I have found that our cars seem to have the front toe change from normal use so that the toe out increases over time, especially with wide tires like the SVT has. As a result, my preference is to set the front toe as close to 0 as possible while still being very slightly toed out and the rear toe as close to 0 as possible while still being slightly toed in. This way it is not only stable when first done, but will take longer to drift to the point of causing tire wear. In other words, the alignment will last longer.