front end issues after alignment, variable steering?

[jimmy57]

The toe setting being off will make a front drive car fight you on acceleration.
Calibration on alignment machines does get off. A tech friend at a Volvo store told me he was re-doing several alignments after he found a car that he could not align after changing every part that could affect the alignment plus having it gauged an a body shop frame bench. They called the Hunter alignment service guy and he came and checked and fixed their machine. The problem car was perfect and he removed a lot of the installed parts and it was still fine. He did some research and found one of the guys in the shop rolled the A/C charging machine into the stand for the alignment machine optical scanner.

[MoVolvos]

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Per Jimmy the Alignment machine could be off but given the before alignment specs the tire wear and current left rear camber you could be experiencing the 5 degree angle in the steering. As it stands the Toe is set high enough that the car is plowing forward so you will be in a straight line regardless if your steering is slightly off. Like a skier when you point your skis toe in you will go straight and the more you do so the more difficult it is steer you left or right. The uneven tire wear and current set up again could be throwing the steering off slightly yet keep you going straight.

If you look at the edge of the two tires carefully the right edge or rib of the left front tire is worn compared with the 3 remaining outer ribs of the same tire and right front tire. There is no feathering on the edges so the depth will be even going across the entire tire as a wedge thereby having less tire depth than the right front tire. The front to back rotation is to hopefully offset the left rear camber which is slightly pushing the rear to the right of the road. To exaggerate, if you take a large tire and small tire on an axle not attached to the car and roll it it will go in a large circle with the larger tire circling around the smaller. Having the right side rear with more depth with circle around the left rear or in essence pushing the car left but because the rear camber is pushing right my hope is both sides will negate any push from each other. Without seeing the rear tires though I am hoping the depth will be more even so not to cause any steering issues while at the front of the car and with the tires MAXED out on pressure they will ride the inner part of the tire more with less edge interference as they are not evenly worn due to the previous toe setting.

The goal is to see if the tires and current spec is causing the steering issue as we are not able to determine if the Alignment machine is out besides the uneven tire wear, depth and current alignment specs may just be enough to cause the five degree tilt in the steering even though it still steer fairly straight.

Blessings
BKM
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[MoVolvos]

this is for our 2003 XC70 with 140Kish. One tire size up from spec.

Front end always pulled to right since buying used last year. Steering wheel was also considerably "cocked" to the right about 5 degrees or so.

Can you elaborate more on this. Looking at the before Alignment Specs front and rear and the front tire wear the car should indeed be pulling right but the steering should have been cocked, turned, tilted pointing to the left of the car?

Blessings,
BKM
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[JetMechGAC]

Have you verified that the AWD is working correctly? Sounds like there is no torque going to the rear wheels and what you are experiencing is run of the mill torque steer that was being masked by the out of spec alignment.