If you replace tie-rod ends...

[mckellyb]

Make certain to check the toe afterward. This is imperative. You'd be blown-away by how out-of-whack the front-end on our cars can be, yet by steering feel/overall feedback/noise, you'd think everything was 100% A-okay...eh.

Sorry, it's hot lately, and I miss the Canadian Rockies.

Cars I've had in the past would have been near-undriveable with the amount of toe-out I had just yesterday.

I know mine had effectively -0- toe before I started, but one cannot accurately estimate how much 'slop' is in the joints before you replace them. As a result, new joints, tie-rod ends & center link in this case, remove all the slack which has been built into alignments for who knows how long.

This is what alignments do, take out the slack which builds with pretty much every mile of travel.

The key here, is after measuring all the previous tie-rod-to-outer-edge-of-tie-rod-link measurements I did with a digital caliper, down to one-tenth of a millimeter, after everything was put back together, you could merely look at it and see there was toe-out.

I don't have the angle, 'cause that requires both trigonometry and a measurement I didn't take (the base of the triangle, if you're wondering)...it's going to the shop, tomorrow, so I just want to ensure I don't kill what's left of the tires on there in the 10 miles between here and the shop, but the toe-out, if you measure from the identical places on a tire tread on the front of the tire and the rear of the tire, where a tape measure isn't touching anything underneath, was 1/4 of an inch.

Sorry, I'd post metric, but I don't have a metric tape measure long enough for this.

After adjustments to the tie-rods, I managed to get it down to 1/16" of toe-out, which will work, short-term. The tires are already on the wear-bars, and I'll have new ones ordered up soon as the alignment is done by those with the proper measurement tools.

One tip...if you decide to work on front-end pieces which tweak the overall geometry of the entire thing, IOW, replacing anything other than the steering damper, make absolutely certain you move the car backwards and forwards, just half a meter (1.5 feet) is enough, before taking the 'after' measurement. This is, of course, if you don't have an alignment jig in your garage. The suspension must 'resettle' after an adjustment.

Me? I have a tape measure, a faithful wife, a calculator, and wrenches. It works shockingly well, actually. This isn't the first auto I've 'tweaked' with rudimentary tools, and it's amazing...I found a real-world use for trigonometry. High-school math comes in handy!

Now, if only that college calculus wasn't taking up valuable gearhead space...