Latest / After-Hours with Faction! Motorsports / UNDER THE HOOD Ep. 4: Pre-Alignment Inspection
Transcript
- 0:10What's going on, guys? Welcome back to another episode
- 0:12of Under the Hood. Well, what's up?
- 0:16With Malcolm and Frankie. That's me.
- 0:19This is Episode 4. Today we are going to be talking
- 0:22about alignments. Basically, we're going to be
- 0:25talking about what you should do before your first real
- 0:29alignment, Yeah? Because, you know, dude, I just
- 0:33just finished putting arms in my car, put the coilovers in it.
- 0:36I'm just come for an alignment. That's.
- 0:39That's all that I do, right? Yep.
- 0:41I mean, I did all the work. That's all that we hear on the
- 0:43phone when they Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 0:45I'm just trying to cut costs. I just did all the work myself.
- 0:47Just you guys gotta, you know, make a drive straight.
- 0:51Yeah. Unfortunately, it's not that
- 0:53simple. But yeah, that's what most of
- 0:55our customers like. When when the phone rings and
- 0:58they want an alignment, we always try to, you know, well,
- 1:00what have you done to it, what modifications have you made and
- 1:05who installed it? That's pretty much the first
- 1:06question. And if they installed it
- 1:09themselves, unfortunately I don't know them.
- 1:11So I just have to assume that it could be done wrong and I have
- 1:14to offer what we call our pre alignment inspection.
- 1:17So we're kind of be going to be going over that today as well as
- 1:22as just a bunch of notes I have here on what you guys should
- 1:25look into on your cars before you bring it to an alignment for
- 1:30your first alignment. And when we talk about
- 1:32alignments in this episode, we are not talking about going to,
- 1:36you know your local mechanic and getting an alignment.
- 1:39We're going to assume that you're you are going to a shop
- 1:43that knows performance cars and can give you an actual alignment
- 1:49and every. Degree matters.
- 1:50Yeah, like like a shop that knows how to adjust adjustable
- 1:54arms. If you're going to a regular
- 1:57mechanic and you think they're going to understand how to set
- 2:01up your Wisefab front end, you're going to have a bad time.
- 2:04So let's just tell you that right off the bat.
- 2:06I would say save your money and find a proper alignment shop so
- 2:10you don't have to even go through that because we've heard
- 2:13plenty of stories. But people come here all the
- 2:15time. They, they go to different
- 2:17alignment shops in the area, but none of these alignment shops.
- 2:21They. I mean, people literally go to
- 2:23what, Midas? Yeah, they've.
- 2:26Tried. Yeah, they try to go to Midas
- 2:27and they're like, hey, yeah, I just installed this wise fab
- 2:31angle. You got?
- 2:32This tech. Arms, Upper arms.
- 2:35Yeah, I saw it on Adam L ZS YouTube.
- 2:38Yeah, figure it out. And you think those mechanics
- 2:42from Lincoln Tech that graduated a year ago are going to know
- 2:44what the hell is going on? Crazy.
- 2:46They're not, dude. They don't know what is going
- 2:48on. So you got to pony up, you got
- 2:50to pay the extra money, you got to go to a real alignment shop.
- 2:52Like Faction Motorsports? Yeah.
- 2:54If you're in this area, we would definitely be a good option.
- 2:57I mean, we've had customers come here from what, Connecticut?
- 3:03Yeah, we've had all tri-state area people come here.
- 3:06So Yep. Yeah.
- 3:09If you need an alignment and you are local to us, give us a call.
- 3:12But if you are not local to us, make sure you're going to
- 3:15someone that can actually perform your alignment properly
- 3:18before you do anything else because that's step one.
- 3:21You don't want to waste your time and their time to be
- 3:24honest, but they might charge you accordingly and it's going
- 3:27to be painful. Yep, and you're going to have
- 3:30nothing to show for. It didn't.
- 3:32We have a Didn't we have a customer come here once and he
- 3:36told us he spent like $800 on his alignment.
- 3:39Yeah, yeah, yeah. What?
- 3:40I don't know. I don't know.
- 3:42What Car it was. Oh, I know what it was.
- 3:44It was AZ. It was AZ.
- 3:46And the guy was new to drifting. Yeah, I remember this.
- 3:50Yeah, it was something wild, like around $800.
- 3:53Yeah, eight hundred $900.00 for the alignment.
- 3:55And they did not do anything right.
- 3:57Yeah. And I was like, holy shit.
- 3:59And then he ended up paying us, you know, whatever it was at the
- 4:02time, two $5300. And we'd spent probably way more
- 4:07time than they did and and he was set up properly.
- 4:10So yeah, you want to make sure you're going to a proper
- 4:13alignment shop. That's the first thing.
- 4:16Second thing, I have a bunch of notes here, so I'm just going to
- 4:20read through them. These are not in any particular
- 4:22order. These are just everything that
- 4:23came to mind when I was thinking about this episode.
- 4:26So basically if basically what we're going to do is we're going
- 4:32to talk about what we go over in our pre alignment inspection.
- 4:36So this is what Chris and Jesus here at the moment.
- 4:39Inspect your vehicle for when it comes in and if it says pre
- 4:42alignment inspection on the repair order that's the first
- 4:45thing they do because they want to make sure that everything is
- 4:47good to go before we put it on the alignment rack.
- 4:49This service is not included in our alignments.
- 4:52It's another service that's added on.
- 4:54It costs about $50 at the moment, 40 to $50 and it can
- 5:01save you in the long run because if if you decide not to do this
- 5:03and you think your car's set up perfectly, at our shop, if you
- 5:06decide your car's set up perfectly and you you know, you
- 5:09decide, yeah, I don't need a pre alignment inspection.
- 5:11I just did everything myself and I saw I.
- 5:12Don't want to pay the extra 50 bucks?
- 5:13Yeah, that's crazy. And then we put it on the
- 5:16alignment rack and then we find out that something's wrong.
- 5:20You're going to be paying a $70.00 setup charge, so now
- 5:23you're paying more and you're going to take your car back
- 5:25home. You could have just paid the 50
- 5:26bucks could have. Paid the 50 bucks, we might have
- 5:28been able to fix it. Yeah, you know, obviously we're
- 5:31going to offer if we if we can fix it, we're going to offer to
- 5:33fix it. If not, then you're going to
- 5:36save the money, you're going to know what's wrong and you can
- 5:39take it back home. So that was the point of the pre
- 5:42alignment inspection. That was actually Chris's idea
- 5:44and I didn't believe in it at first because I didn't thought
- 5:46anyone pay for it. But now we're seeing that people
- 5:50are actually learning what's going on and they're like yeah,
- 5:52and I need to make sure I got to double check my work.
- 5:55So I think it's about $45 or something right now, but it's
- 5:58definitely worth it. So this is everything that we we
- 6:01do a once over on the suspension during the pre alignment
- 6:05inspection. First thing I have here is make
- 6:08sure your tie rods are not bent or worn and not seized.
- 6:12Now I don't expect everyone to check this stuff but but look
- 6:17this is the pre alignment inspection episode.
- 6:19So I'm going to tell you what we're going to check.
- 6:22That way you guys can check all of this stuff before you even
- 6:26come here. And to be honest if you check
- 6:29all the stuff and and you made sure then you don't need a pre
- 6:32alignment inspection. Just bring it in and we'll do
- 6:34the alignment. Save yourself some money.
- 6:36So they're going to check the tie rods.
- 6:39They're going to make sure they're not bent, physically,
- 6:41bent like visibly, I mean, or worn.
- 6:45As far as play And inner tie rod, same thing on the outer tie
- 6:49rod. They're going to make sure that
- 6:50there's no play and that they're not seized.
- 6:54That's a big thing too, because inner and outer tie rods get
- 6:56seized together. So if we get it on the rack and
- 7:00we go to find this out, a couple things.
- 7:03First thing is we can't do the alignment properly.
- 7:06OK, guys, what you heard there was a little excerpt from our
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