Alignment: Dealership or Elsewhere?
 

As per title, do you trust regular alignment shops to do alignment correctly, or is it necessary to go to dealerships? I'd rather not go there, but want it done correctly. Thanks,

Don Ivey
'13 FR-S

Alignment shops do hundreds of them a week. They are either capable enough to do any car or they go out of business fast. Just pick one that has been around a while and all is good.

How good an alignment is depends directly on the person actually doing it. I've gotten both good and bad alignments at private shops and dealerships; 99% of them will just do a 'by-the-'book' alignment, which means if everything is within the wide range of factory specs, they call it good, since that's good enough for the typical grocery-getter. My suggestion is look for a shop that's been there for a long time, and for an old dude to be doing the alignment work. It usually takes a little convincing to get them to use more aggressive, non-stock numbers, but they'll get it right on the money on the first try usually.

Years ago I took my Passat to a tire place and asked if they were set to handle this car. Swore up and down they did many of them.

Turned out they had no experience with Passat and the parameters weren't even loaded into the system.

They said they would try to dial it in for me. No way. I told them they were done with the car. To top it off, they jimmied a lug nut. The dealer had a hell of a time fixing it. I took the bill to the tire place and made them pay it. They were surprised at the high bill. I told them it will be a lot more if we lawyer up and go downtown and they get to eat court costs on top of it.

Last time I went to a tire franchise. Costco is my choice. Limited selection but they have what I want and their customer service is legendary.

Look up reviews of alignment shops in your area. Make sure to get an alignment report that shows the before and after specs.

Well, I reckon that depends on who is on duty on the alignment rack.

For average driving, any shop or dealership that has a rack and someone who knows how to use it, will do..

Personally, I take my cars to a local shop where I know the fellows.


humfrz

If you have a Firestone shop near you,you should take advantage of their lifetime alignment service.

Here's a good way to find out if you can trust the shop...
Go to whichever dealership/private shop you want, and ask them:

"Can you adjust my camber to -1.5?" (or whatever degree you prefer)

If they answer "Yes", get the hell out of there as fast as you can!

Not picking on Firestone (ok, maybe a little).. but I stopped by during a tire "sale" once. The guy at the counter said he has some performance tires if that's what I prefer on my car. I told him ok, but what's the speed rating on that tire?... The guy's eyebrow immediately raised, he went to look at the tire for about a minute, then came back to me and said "There's no speed rating on that tire." :lol:

Needless to say, I left and never thought of going to another Firestone again.
Sorry for digressing.

What matters is what comes after "yes" if it's a discussion about adjustable alignment components on an 86 then you might have just found a good shop.

As stated before it depends on the shop, there's dealerships with alignment techs that are amateur racers that will nail it and there's 'performance shops' that do a sloppy job.



If all you need is a decent street alignment (seems like that's all OP wants) pretty much any reputable shop should be able to do just fine, it's a very simply designed car, you just gotta accept that factory stock there is no camber adjustment on this car.

not to open a can of worms, but camber bolts should be plenty for a street car? and do most alignment shops install them?

Wherever you go, ask for a printout of the before/after to see the difference. I would get these every time I had an alignment on my last car (salvaged after an accident, hence the multiple alignments), and they would give me a printout every time so I could tell what was off for reference when I was getting my repairs done. It was pretty neat to see the accuracy of their charts (assuming they were accurate).

Just fyi, I went to a basic auto shop, nothing fancy and no dealership. Even though it was my last car, I built enough rapport with the shop that I would take my FR-S there for an alignment if it ever needed one.

Thanks for clarifying. I should've said if they answered 'yes' without asking/discussing camber bolts. Any shop that assumes camber is adjustable in stock form are the ones you want to avoid, is what I meant.

If you only need toe adjustment, you can pretty easily do it yourself with a few jackstands and some string, google 'string alignment'. That's what most racing teams do. Anything beyond toe requires either a lot of math or some more involved instruments, though.

If you want someone else to do it, as everyone else has said, it doesn't really depend on the shop, it depends on who's working there that day. Unless you already have experience with a place it's hard to tell if it's good or not. I would not recommend a dealership over a private shop. Dealers have very little incentive to do good work, private shops depend on it for their livelihood.