What would you do if you worked at a tyre fitting company but you noticed the forum you’d had the smarts to set up was getting up to 50 emails every day asking about wheel alignment, often with a faintly desperate air?
If you were Tony Bones you’d quit your job and set up your own wheel alignment company. He did this a few years back, and set the Wheels in Motion – the name of his company - with its website at wheelsinmotion.co.uk.
Many of us know the symptoms, including a steering wheel not straight, the tyres scrubbing expensively or the car is pulling to one side. And we know the answer from a lot of tyre centres – ‘Yeah they all do that’ or ‘We’ve made the adjustments and it’s dead right’. Only it’s not and you know it isn’t. But you have no idea what is wrong exactly.
You might or might not have a clearer answer if you spent some time looking at the theory section on the Wheels in Motion website. But, being honest, after wading through kingpin inclination angle theory, axis deviation theory and sequential alignment fault diagnostics we felt the answer was more like a single malt theory.
Mr Bones knows all this stuff to, well, his bones. He’s also got the entrepreneurial spirit, as you’ve probably already gathered. One neat thing he’s doing is he’s created a network of loyal local customers and he checks their vehicles’ wheel alignment and geometry at intervals. He does this for free. Why? Maybe because he’s a nice man, but he’s also amassing a database of specs, problems and remedies that he can apply to other cars.
The result is that he can perfectly calibrate a car, sometimes better than when it came off the showroom floor. Like with BMW cars on the run-flat tyres, which have stiffer sidewalls that not only make the ride harder they wear out the tyres faster. He’s perfected new settings that cure the problem without causing any other issues – not something BMW seems capable of doing.
If you have, say, a Mazda MX-5 then Mr Bones can tailor the set-up so precisely you can have it set for fast road, track, hillclimb, sprint, drift, you name it. You won’t get that at your local tyre fitters, as he points out.
“Some of them only align the front wheels with each other, rather than aligning them with the thrust angle in the middle of the rear of the car as they should. And forget checking the Ackermann angle, they’ve probably never heard of it!”
We roll our eyes and tut and shake our heads at such ignorance, while making a note to find out what the heck the Ackermann angle is – actually it’s the relationship of the inner and outer wheels on full lock.
Bones (no, not that one) has a main partner, called Hawkeye (no, not that one). Hawkeye is a wheel alignment machine that uses lasers to read 30 angles around the car. It doesn’t need music played loud, or fag breaks or endless cups of tea.
And it doesn’t end there. There’s the tyre sales side, called Blackboots, which has as customers the Sultan of Brunei among others, who likes to get his Ferrari F40 rebooted there. If you’re after a rare tyre, this is the place. And then of course you have to have the tyre fitted on the rim. But you won’t see a tyre lever here.
Instead there’s the Boss Touchless Tyre Changer, that uses hydraulic, rubber-coated arms, to lever off the tyre without so much as marking the rim with dust.
This is an amazing place, and if you do take your car there, just make sure you know what the Ackermann angle is.
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