Got my company 2017 Superb Estate back yesterday from the bodyshop who have spent 3 months repairing a light, offside front smack in the snow. Car slid at about 10mph in 1st gear on a hill into one of those little bridges with concrete bollards supporting a scaffold pole railing. 

 

New bumper, bonnet, wing, driving light, headlight, grill and various auxiliary components under the bonnet. The lengthy wait to get it back was caused by the "Bumper Harness" which was on back order with no replenishment date. Anyway, I digress. 

 

The week before the bump, I'd had the two front tyres replaced like-for-like for Pirellis as they'd worn the inner edges almost to cords - incidentally, I'd asked our procurement department for Michelin Cross Climates as I live very rurally and start out at 05:40 in the morning, so I get below 8 degree starts for a lot more of the year compared to most, but they wouldn't do it. Two days later we had big snow, I had my bump, and now they've got a £2,500 excess bill and 3 months car rental to pay. All for the sake of an additional £20 per tyre x4 compared to the Summer tyres I now have instead. I'd have never had such an accident with any type of Winter tyre or the Cross Climates, as the car probably would't have slipped away from me at that sort of speed, and I would almost certainly have been able to stop it!

 

The leasing company insist on us using ATS and it turned out that the branch I used in Market Harborough don't have the settings for aligning wheels on the current Superb. Only the old one.  I also discovered the lease company won't pay for rear wheel alignment, only the fronts.

 

Seeing an opportunity, I asked the bodyshop to align all 4 wheels as part of the repair process, and attached is the print out they've sent back with the car. It's black and white unfortunately, but laid out next to the accurate colour report I snatched from another post on this forum, mine on the surface at least, looks somewhat outside tolerance. 

 

In the "Before" example, mine looks almost right. In the "Current", the left-front is quite vastly different. I'm now concerned that by lining up the geometry, it's exposed that either the suspension hasn't been refitted to the car properly, or that the bump's caused the car's frame to twist somewhere. 

 

Obvious solutions would be to either have the car put on a Hunter somewhere else for further alignment, and another would be to chuck the car back at the bodyshop, but that causes all sorts of other issues so I'd rather avoid it if I can. 

 

Does anyone have a solid idea if the attached black and white "Current" set up in the lower image is OK?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

Register on WIM and post the question there. Tony will tell you anything you need to know.

4 minutes ago, Rustynuts said:

Register on WIM and post the question there. Tony will tell you anything you need to know.

 

Brilliant site! Thanks for that. Unfortunately the Captcha bot check thing isn't working at the mo, so I can't register. I'll try again later. 

I've sent Tony a message, see if it can be sorted.

Apparently it's a Captcha issue. The old Captcha (V1) system is no longer in use and should be updated to V2, but it hasn't been. They're looking into it.

Anyway, in the meantime I took the liberty of posting it for you. See here...

 

https://www.wheels-inmotion.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=17664

That image looks familiar

 

I would recommend getting the tracking done on another (recently calibrated) Hunter setup. Even if the camber is out due to damage or poorly fitted suspension/subframe bolts you will have a much better argument with independent confirmation. Fingers crossed it’s just their setup that’s not been calibrated in years… might be why they only like to provide mono printouts?

Kwik Fit gets a hard time, but they love tracking because it’s all margin and most centres have live video of the work being done. Their Hunter calibration doesn’t come out of the workshop budget so managers are happy to have it done.

Edited 20 May, 20188 yr by Alan_P