I have a '95 F350 CC DRW 2WD truck. 242K on the odometer. The truck is heavily used on highway miles, with little city or off road driving.

The truck has started to wear the outsides of the tires bad recently. It's never been aligned in the time I've owned it (120K at the time). Poking around the front end, I'm finding a bad right outer tie rod and left upper ball joint. Everything else is very tight. The I-beam and radius arm bushings feel tight when unloaded and pried on hard. They also appear to be in good shape. There is no driveability issue, it tracks straight and steers nice.

I'm figuring on replacing all four ball joints. I'm leaning towards doing all tie rods (that right inner is big $$$$, ouch!).

The part I don't get is I can visually see positive camber and why it's wearing on the outside. Why? The only thing that should cause positive camber would be lower ball joints. Bad bushings, bad upper ball joints and tired springs all should cause negative camber. What I'm worried about is that I'm missing something and the money spent on alignment will be wasted and I'm not going to fix the tire wear issue. Anything I should be replacing?

 

Positive Camber
When the bottom of the tire is more inwards and the top is out, that is referred to as positive camber. Positive camber wears the outside of the tires at a rapid rate. Positive camber is generally the result of a bad alignment or wearing ball joint.


Hopefully a ball joint replace will fix it but my moms E250 needed the ibeam heated and bent to correct her camber.

 

Do you haul or tow heavy? I've seen at work the trucks that haul or tow heavy to always have positive camber specially the Chitty's.

 

Haul, heck yes. I've got a 11.5' slide in camper. The sucker is almost 5k. I've got a small farm so it's not uncommon for me to throw 3 ton of rock or 2 ton of feed in at any time. The real bear on the camper is that the water tank is at the front and the waste tanks are under the rear overhang. I'll have 500lbs at the front of the bed on the way out and come back with 500lbs behind the truck. I also sometimes tow with the camper on, but it's not heavy.

Tow some but not as much. Once in a while I'll borrow the inlaws tractor. That's nearly 14k including the trailer.

But will that persist with the empty truck? I can understand wear on the tires when towing with the front end light. But why the positive camber while empty? It's so bad I can see it.

 

I thought it meant a worn lower. I also thought the lowers went first, but I've got just one upper that's shot. The other three are tight as heck and this one is BAD.


Isn't that SOP on a kingpin? I thought the kingpin axles were camber adjusted by bending the axle beam. With a ball joint they have a whole bunch of range of motion. If it was that bad I'd suspect that there was major problems with the frame or something was really bad.

 

With a light weight front end the suspension adjust itself to where it wants to, I've seen it at work lots of times, nothing a tire rotation can't fix.

 

Gotcha... lots of time light on the front coils lets them "grow". Makes sense to me.

Rotation is a PITA on a DRW with aluminum wheels. The fronts are polished and tapered on one side, rear outers are polished and tapered on the other side, insides are steel. Rotation means dismount and re-mount.

What I do is throw two new tires on at a time on the back end and move the most worn rear set up front. That keeps the dual pairs matched from the start.

 

Your fix could be some air bags, or a helper spring, or add a 500lbs steel bumper/brush guard lol...