Any "aftermarket" repair shop is suspect. Its all in the quality of the mechanics they employ and generally the work goes to the lowest paid employee and generally least experienced....


Lets note I have had good and bad experiences at NTB...Good at their salem NH store, Bad at the now defunct Greensburg IN store.


I had a bad experience at the firestone stone here in Cincinnati OH.


So far the local Tire discounters has been good.


One trend I am noticing is that the hack jobs behind the desk (service writers) often know nothing about auto mechanics... or at least very little.


I generally like to talk to the mechanic if possible, Tire discounters is nice as I can generally hang outside the bay watch him work and ask questions to engage him and get solid answers/ opinions...


This asking questions is what caused the issues with Firestone...


With my free floating rear end there is a special socket to release the ratcheting nut that holds the bearings and drums on....their mechanic said he uses a chisel to pound that nut off...essentially destroying it.... yeah...none of my vehicles have gone back there..

 

My trick for this is to buy new sleeves along with the tie rods / drag links / etc., then completely assemble it off the truck. Then drop the whole old assembly at once and set them side-by-side, along with measuring them. Then hang the whole new assembly. If the wheels haven't turned (truck on the ground) in the interim, it should line up good.

 

Good Points Fellas.

They actually got the old adjustment sleeve off the tie rods and installed a new one. They have to align it and put the some standard zirks back in, hopefully it will be ok and I can get it tonight.

 

Good point there! Yeah if you live in a rust belt state, might as well plan on replacing the adjuster sleeves anyway. By the time you get all the rust cleaned off, you might not have a sleeve anymore! Even the higher end replacements are not terribly expensive. I have used your technique as well, works great.

 

Yes, I've heard that Moog quality isn't what it used to be. Wish I'd heard that before I bought and installed the ball joints... They looked good and the machine work seemed OK.

 

Probably too late and I'm not sure it will help much at this point; if it were mine I'd also have them loosen and properly torque the ball joint nuts per Moog's written instructions.

 

Can that be redone once they have tightened them up? I can do that myself now that I got the truck back. It seems pretty good now that the toe in is in spec. I did not see a link to these torqueing instructions, can anyone point me in the right direction?

 

Like I mentioned in the other post, I'm not sure if it will help to re-torque now. Plus, the symptom of improperly torqued ball joints is tight steering so if your truck is steering OK now that they fixed the toe-in, they were probably torqued close enough. Here's a link. The torque instructions are near the end of the second page.

http://fme-cat.com/livedocs/DYK12_101_ENG-R.pdf

Also, I understand that most alignment shops will give you a computer printout of your before and after alignment specs? Seems like they should provide that so you know what they did and what your caster/camber/toe-in settings are?

 

Yes I have them. The issue was with the toe in, it is in spec now. The other measurements for caster and camber look good too. Thanks for the info and the link, much appreciated.

 

I took a look at the ball joint installation instructions. It's highly unlikely they did this since they are really just a bunch of hacks over there, the steering wheel return is not as good as it used to be. Hopefully it will loosen up after a while.