Alignment Shop Fail

[Carmen Black]

After buying a perfectly good running truck, I decided I needed to replace the front springs which the PO had cut down to the point they rattled in their pockets. That turned into this.

So after replacing everything but the engine and the sheet metal, I finally made an appointment for the alignment shop. I chose Merchants Tire because it was 2 miles from my house, and I was worried about having a problem with the truck or dragging the non-aligned tires since it hadn't been out of garage in 9 months.

Well the guy at the shop types the VIN number into a handheld computer. The VIN doesn't come up so he just looks at me and says he can't help me.
I ask him what he is talking about and he says if my truck isn't in the computer, he doesn't know how to align it. The he says that my truck probably has shims. I say yes, its probably got a 1/2 inch of shims on each side. He looked at me like I just fell out of the sky. So I just got back in my truck and left.

The good news is the truck ran great and didn't really feel out of alignment. I kept all the shims together that came out of the truck so I could put them back in and pulled the tie rods out as an assembly so that I could match the length of the new MOOG parts and it drove surprisingly well.

It was really nice weather today and I really wanted to get back on the road.
I just didn't think someone had to have a computer tell them how to do an alignment. I guess I have to find some old timer shop to make this happen.