Eastern Tyre Centres offers professional wheel alignment and wheel balancing services, to deliver superior driving control, comfort and safety. Wheel Alignment and Wheel Balancing helps to ensure that your vehicle is safer to drive, and can prolong the lifespan of your tyres.

A wheel alignment is key to ensuring that you get the best wear and performance out of your tyres. When your tyres are correctly aligned, your car handles better. A correct wheel alignment will ensure that your steering wheel is centred and tyres are in the correct facing position.

Do You Need a Wheel Alignment?

Signs that you may need a wheel alignment include feeling as though your vehicle is pulling to one side of the road, or your steering wheel starts to vibrate or shudder when driving at higher speeds.

Unaligned wheels typically occur over time, through every day driving. Incidents such as hitting potholes or curbs can fast track the occurrence. You should have a wheel alignment completed whenever you are fitting new tyres, or if you change the suspension on your car, and at a minimum once a year once a year along with a tyre rotation to ensure tyre life is maximised.

What Happens in a Wheel Alignment?

A wheel alignment is the measurement, analysis and adjustment of your vehicle’s steering and suspension angles. It makes sure that the wheels are perpendicular (at an angle of 90 degrees) to the ground and parallel to each other. To the naked eye, your vehicle’s wheels may appear to be facing straight ahead but if the alignment is out by as little as one millimeter from the manufacturer’s recommendations, this may be enough to cause premature wear to your tyres.

Due to every vehicle make being unique, there are different methods of adjustment. Ultimately however, a wheel alignment involves three main measurements – caster, camber and toe. These measurements have standards that a qualified Eastern Tyre Centre technician uses as targets of adjustment.

How can a Wheel Alignment save you money?

Wheel alignment prolongs the life of your tyres and protects your wallet from unnecessary plundering.

Hi my name is Joe and I own Eastern Tyre centre.

Today I want to talk to you about wheel alignments. Did you know a badly aligned steering and suspension system is the main reason why tyres wear out prematurely. This is why wheel alignments are so important.

To give you an idea, a normal tyre should last about 40000kms, but if the wheels are out of alignment by as little as 2 mm, that life can be reduced to 20000kms. That’s half the life of the tyre.

Remember when you shopped around for that super cheap tyre price, you probably saved about $50 on a $250 tyre, well imagine if the alignment was badly out of specifications and the tyre wore out in half the time, that $50 saving just turned into a $125 loss over the life of that tyre, multiply that by 4 wheels and you have just lost $500!! This is why wheel alignments are so critical.

See this tyre, it’s worn more on one side than the other: 4mm on this side and 2mm on this side. This was directly related to the wheel alignment.

So what is the wheel alignment? This little video explains it quite simply. See how the wheels need to point straight ahead, well, when the left and right wheels are parallel to each other then they’re perfectly aligned.

However, if the wheels are pointing away from each other like this, they will wear on the inside edge and if they’re pointing towards each other then they will wear on the outside edge, and on most modern cars this applies to the back wheels as well.

The way we align the wheels is with a fancy machine naturally called a wheel alignment machine. These modern computerised machines takes the guess work out of alignments and is super accurate. Once the heads are mounted on the wheels like this, the computer can precisely see where the wheels are pointing, not only in this direction call toe-in, but also in this direction, called camber.

The readings appear on the screen and then the technician will make the necessary adjustments to ensure the wheels are pointing in the correct way.

Wheel alignments regularly go out of adjustment and so should be performed each time you have tyres replaced or as a minimum every 12 months.

The cost to carry out a wheel alignment varies greatly within the industry. Obviously a shop which has an experienced technician using a modern alignment machine will charge a bit more. A 4-wheel alignment normally costs around $65 to $125 and a 2-wheel alignment is usually around $45 to $75. A complex car like a BMW or Mercedes can take a bit longer to do and they’re normally priced in the upper range.

I hope this video on wheel alignments has been informative. Thank you for watching.

Wheel Balancing for a Smooth Drive and Less Wear

When combined with a wheel alignment, balanced wheels provide you with a smooth ride and reduce the chances of premature tyre wear. If a wheel is out of balance, it will cause a vibration that can be felt through the steering wheel, most notably when travelling at higher speeds. Failure to address these warning signs can seriously impact on your vehicle’s overall performance.

A wheel balance ensures that the weight of your wheels is evenly distributed around the tyre. This works to prolong the life of your tyres, increase performance and improve your vehicle’s safety.

When do you need a Wheel Balance?

The probability of a tyre and rim being made perfectly symmetrical is low. Inevitably, there will be slightly more weight somewhere on each, which is why a wheel balance is a necessity when fitting new tyres to a wheel or when existing tyres are dismounted for repair.

A wheel balance may also be required if you are experiencing shuddering in the steering wheel, uneven treadwear, rapid treadwear, or a combination of these symptoms.

There are different misalignment conditions that result in different symptoms. The following table will help you wrap your head around it:

Incorrect camber settingPremature wear either on the inside or outside shoulder
Incorrect toe settingFeathered wear (angled wear) across the tread and raised edges on tread blocks
Incorrect castor settingExcessive wear on the shoulders and heel-toe wear pattern on tread blocks
Unequal castor settingSteering compensation due to sharp pulling, resulting in feather wear
Unequal toe settingSteering compensation due to sharp pulling, resulting in feather wear
Two or more settings are out of whackIrregular tread wear, including feathering and bald spots

Book in now with a qualified technician at Eastern Tyre Centre

When you choose to have a wheel balance done through Eastern Tyre Centre, a qualified technician will diagnose your wheel balance using a special machine. They will then balance your vehicle’s wheels be affixing weights to the rim.