In the last few weeks I've followed a few lifted 250s and 350s down the highway that were dog tracking. Nice eye catching trucks with a lot of money poured into them. I wonder what went wrong? They looked too clean and shiney to have been doing any serious off roading but you never know. Can lift kits be installed improperly? Are some of them just for show and not tough enough for off roading? What made me ask was another thread where the guy only got 8000 miles on his big tires.

 

Not doing a 4wheel alignment after installation.
Not using a adjustable trackbar will pull the front spings over .
Springs are skewed
Or the frame was bent from the factory

Rich

 

What does dog tracking mean?

 

Dog tracking is where the rear of the truck is not driving in line with the front, so it's kinda off to one side or the other.

Biggest thing that will make it dog track is putting the springs on the wrong way, especially the rear. What I mean by this is one spring is mounted front toward the front, but the other is mounted rear toward the front. The center pin on most lifted SD's is not perfectly centered; doing that will tweak the rear axle enough to dog track the truck.

As far as the guy only getting 8K on his tires, you gotta look at what he was running. What kind of tires (soft, sticky, swamper type tires?), what engine (diesel?), did he get an alignment after the lift?, was he doing a lot of highway Lots of things to look at in that case.

You have to be realistic in your lift / tire approach. I mean seriously think what you want the truck to do. If you are just doing the look cool thing, get a good, hard AT tire (BFG's, Toyo, Nitto's). If you are a weekend off-roader (mud, milder trails, etc), get a decent MT (GY MTR's, BFG MT's, etc.), but stick to a radial type tire for the ride and mileage benefit. If you are seriously only planning this thing as play toy, then yeah, go for a set of swampers, boggers, LTB's, whatever, get the bias tire for good footprint and flexibility.

 

rear axle not centered on frame will make the vehicle dog walk. one side is more forward that the other. when dog walking, the rear axle is tracking straight, but the vehicle isnt . very common after heavy accidents. start measuring distances from the rear axle to identical frame referance points and see what the measure says.

 

I call it the "crab walk".

And I gotta agree with Rich, the biggest reason is the front trackbar. They lift it,and don't get an adjustable track bar (or don't adjust it right), so the entire front end is pulled to the left.

 

I see. One of the local trucking companies did that in a way a few years ago. They lengthened the frame of one of their trucks. The only problem was that they did it 2" too long on one side.

I have never heard it called dog tracking but I have heard of crab walking.

 

Most of the times when you see it, it's on a vehicle that either a) has been modified poorly, or b) on off road truck that took a hard shot and either bent or broke a spring hanger or leaf spring.

 

I had a 72 3/4 ton Ford tool truck that got rolled by an 18 wheeler a couple of months after I got it. The insurance company fixed it but it dogtracked so bad that I could barely see out the passenger rear view. I never did fix it and I put over 200,000 miles on it. It sure used up the tires though. I'm still fond of that truck. I always had directional mud grips on it and it would really squat down and pull. One time I hooked it up to a stuck, fully loaded concrete truck and pulled him out of the mud. I never see fully directional tires anymore; do they still make them?

 

The Mickey Thompson Baja Claw is one directional that comes to mind. I still use a set of Goodyear MT's (not MT/R) that are directional on my little rockcrawler.