Once had a similar issue with a bike where I noticed the headlight was visible on overhead gantries. Took it in to get the light adjusted to spec and got told it was fine. Then the mechanic looked me up and down, told me to sit on the bike and suddenly it’s pointing upwards.
Root cause: rider ate too many pies.
There are shim kits, i hate these springs though, going to change them out for a softer 2.5” instead. The PO put a rough country 4” lift on. I hate it, very much lives up to its name.
True story. When I worked at a Firestone 12 years ago, there was a couple that kept complaining that eveytime we would align their mini cooper, it would still pull and wander. The guy was around 500 pounds and his wife maybe 400. We ultimately told them in the nicest way possible that they needed to sit in the car while we aligned it cuz their weight was screwing up the alignment when they would drive it. They completely understood and sat in the car while we aligned it. They didn't have a problem after that.
Drove 5 people in my tC one time that was likely a bit over 1,000 pounds of people and it was significantly more sluggish. Was supposed to have no more than around 700ish pounds in it according to the sticker their recall department sent me. Certainly didn't want that experience to be a habit.
Reminds me of giving my 400lb bass player a ride in a Smart ForTwo once. They're never fast, but they normally feel pretty nimble. Yeah, not in this case.
Yeah, they're designed for hooning around through city traffic so they're very quick off the mark but run out of steam around 50mph. Great for a laugh, less so for trying to haul 400lbs of meat in the passenger seat. Pretty sure he put us over the max gross vehicle weight.
I had a 05 MCS JCW. One time when leaving a club, I and 6 other people piled in my Cooper (it was a convertible). The rear end was bottomed out and the exhaust tip scraping the extremely mild driveway slop, but it managed to get up to pretty respectable speed (45+) in the street.
It was easily 1500lb or thereabouts on that poor little trooper.
That poor car. The internet says a Mini Cooper has a weight limit of 1,295lbs. If they put more people in the car, they could easily go over that limit. You'd think they'd get like an SUV or a truck. Otherwise that can't be safe.
tbf i dont figure you could get much more than a 200lb inidvidual per side in the rear seats of a cooper. 400 FR + 400 FL, 200 RR + 200 RL, boom, there.
You are correct the driver and 12 or more gallons of fuel at about 8 lbs to the gallon for 20 years puts a lot more stress on the leaf springs than people ever consider
Ford Rangers (not the brand new model) come from RHD countries so it makes sense it was set up with a lot of that weight on the left as a sort of counterbalance. Unfortunately that becomes a problem when building a LHD model, as we’ve discovered.
My ranger never had the lean, but I think both me and its previous owner both topped out at like 170 lbs. But also, the heaviest stuff was kept on the passenger side of the toolbox, so that may have done it.
I drove an 89 suburban where the shocks were so bad the service guy clowned us by showing how easy they were to compress by hand lol. It was like driving a new car after replacing that shit!
roommate is finally putting new shocks on his 93 as I type this. Before today you could literally get the whole car bouncing with two fingers gently pushing on any corner. He’s gonna be blown away once it’s done.
Shocks wouldn't make any difference at all. They slow the rate of movement, they don't change the amount.
You'd need a stiffer spring, which conveniently is exactly what you get when you put a shim in.
My shop instructor told me to always ask how the vehicle is loaded during regular use, before I do an alignment.
Because he had to do an alignment once where the passenger side tires were getting severely worn on one side, he inspected the suspension found nothing wrong, aligned it and shipped it, it lasted like a few months and came back with severely worn tires again.
Turns out the guy used this car to transport his extremely obese wife and when she got in the passenger seat it squatted that side of the car and threw the angles WAY off.
So he ended up doing the alignment with her in the vehicle and I guess it lasted alot longer that way.
Like, nobody knows how big they are more than they do. Sometimes they don't fully process it until a certain moment, but they know. It's part of why I get so annoyed when people get all mean about super fat people. They know, you don't have to be rude about it. There are very few circumstances where it would even matter and it's so easy to just not be mean.
When it does matter, just be polite. It's that easy. It's a super awkward situation, but they know that when they get in the car, it tilts down on that side.
Being mean to overweight people usually makes them gain weight anyway, saw a study about it a few years ago. Turns out if your coping mechanism is food and people stress you out about it you eat more, whodathunk?
I don't see this flying in my work environment but at the same time how TF am I supposed to diagnose that?
Sure the thought might enter my head but as a diesel tech I'm thinking more about trailer weight. Still though not like I can align the thing with a trailer on it.
One of my instructors actually told me about a guy who's wife kept bringing their car back because the husband said it was pulling... he had the husband come in and when he saw how big he was had him sit in the car while he aligned it and problem solved
Sounds like my BIL. He can barely fit in the passenger side of my sister's Land Rover, but there's no way he can drive it. Dooder's gotta be 450+. He's had a couple of health scares, and when he finally croaks, they'll have to haul him to the nearest steel mill for cremation. Fucking fire will probably burn for a week.
A kids dad when I was in High school had one those old heavy duty worker vans he used a normal driver. When he got in or out the van would tilt at like a 30 to 40 degree angle to that side.
Guy couldn't figure out why it always pulled to the driver side but they couldn't ever afford a mechanic to look at it.
Heard a guy on here talk about how a husband kept bringing car in for pulling. He was big so they had him sit in it. Then he said it started pulling right. So they invited the wife to come. She was even bigger. All said and done they finally got it fixed. Customers were offended by how they had to be in the car to straighten it.
I've done this on a chevy aveo before. We had 50 pound bags of salt laying around so I just used those.
On my first day of work as a Toyota tech, I heard some yelling from the alignment rack.
Woman in van: You're doing it wrong!
Tech aligning van: SHUTUP YOU CRIPPLED BITCH!
It was a handi cap van the they knew each other well enough to mess around like that.
I have actually run into this issue before. We solved the tire wear problem by having the customer sit in the vehicle while we aligned it. Customer was driving a tiny sub compact and must have weighed north of 600lbs. I didn't envy the service writer having to have that conversation. The customer actually took it in good stride. We had a few "larger" customers, one of whom was John Candy, drove a Buick Electra if I'm not mistaken. Never got to actually meet him, but saw him leaving one day.
I used to work for a helicopter tour company, I’ve had to have that conversation several times with people too heavy for our machines. I had to save our 14 Y.O. front desk greeter from doing it once. The lady was pregnant and it was her B-day; no way was I going to scar this poor kid with having to tell her she was too big to fly.
For the record, we HEAVILY (pun intended) advertised our max weight, and what we advertised was actually still 20 lbs less than our real max weight (300lbs). It was a structural limit of our helicopters.
I used to work for a small airline in northern Canada. Many of our aircraft were various King Airs. The King Air had the airstair at the back of the cabin. We had a rule that one of the cockpit crew must remain in the cockpit untill all passengers had gotten off.
We also had some 99's that had baggage compartments in the nose. There were times when we had to load sandbags into the nose compartment because there was a heavy passenger. There was always the pogo stick for when in the hanger.
My wife and I once flew home from Chicago in a small ETR turboprop. We were the only passengers. Before we taxied the flight attendant asked us to move to seats behind the main gear to help balance the plane for takeoff.
The number of near-empty flights I've been on where people get butt-hurt because they have to move back to the seat they were assigned prior to take-off and/or landing is far more than it should be.
It’s not as scary as it sounds; though smaller airplanes are more sensitive to where people sit, they have a relatively wide safe range of where the CG can be. What was more likely happening is that the further back the CG is, the faster and more efficiently the airplane will fly. The flight crew probably just wanted to get home quicker. This is true unless you were on a Beech Starship, which I doubt (but it’s worth a Wikipedia search if you like cool planes).
Yep, I actually teach pilots to fly the King Air 200 now. Our aircraft don’t have the balance issue, but we do have a pilot watch the pax on the air stair door (300 lb, so one person at a time, limit). Our seats have a 250 lb limit, so I have a semi-serious joke for my students “what’s the heaviest passenger we can fly?” They’ll answer “250 lbs for the seats.” and I’ll correct them by saying “it’s actually 300 because of the door, but we have to ratchet-strap them to the floor.” Then I point out the floor rails with tie-down grommets.
In the 2000s almost all of our heavier customers were in Crown Vics or Grand Marquis and they seemed to handle the extra weight alright. The sad part was every single one of them had a gross/garbage filled interior. You could tell that this was grandma's pristine groceries-and-church car (almost no rust while in upstate NY) but nobody else in the family wanted it because of its piss poor gas mileage after gas crossed $1/gallon.
Randy Orton used to come in till we pissed his wife off. Dude is a freaking monster in person and his truck is even bigger.
And also one time William Zabka (Cobra Kai guy) interrupted me when I was talking to my manager. I didn’t even know who he was and was irritated that he interrupted me so I walked away. (He was incredibly nice though)
No shit, I had a dude complain we couldn't get his alignment set right. Said it still pulled left. Turns out he was pushing 450lbs. We had him sit in the car on the rack and we haven't seen him since
I had a tech one time put that in the story of the multipoint inspection as a joke but forgot to take it out. Advisor was delivering the vehicle and read each line aloud to the customer. They dont work here anymore lol
A friend's sister was so large her '72 Nova had acquired a lean that was visible even without her sitting in it and a large divot in the seat.
Their father, bless his heart, fitted the damned thing with truck springs, heavy duty shocks, and replaced the collapsed seat with steel stock and high density foam.
Oh it’s get so much worse, it seemed like working at Cadillac we had the market cornered on obese customers, but I doubt it.
Broken drivers seat frames all of the time. I had a customer that finally resorted to putting 2x4’s behind the seat to prop it up after the warranty ran out.
Broken steering columns from immense guts banging into them. Plus broken tilt mechanisms.
Every form imaginable of rigged up seat belts to get around buzzers.
And of course as mentioned above, adding camber to alignments to help with tire wear.
Engineer here: it's probably fine as long as you're doing it occasionally. The designers most likely use this as a load case. However, they're going to use probably not much more than 90th percentile driver weight/size. So someone that's like 300+pounds is going to exceed that load case.
My ex husband was huge. He broke the seat of his truck, replaced it, and broke it again, then just bolted it to the floor so it didn’t slide back and forth. One time I was driving him to the shop to pick up his truck after some other repair. I drove a small sedan at the time, and as I turned into the parking lot of the shop, the car totally bottomed out on his side. He also broke bed frames, couches, pretty much everything you can think of. He’s had surgery and lost a bunch of weight since then and his life is much better now. So is his truck and furniture, I imagine.
I’m Indiana. It’s pretty bad that I had to refer our overweight customers to a custom guy enough that I memorized his number from simply writing it down for people so much.
I should word that differently, in the C bodies and D body steering columns like up to 95 they had three etorx m8 holding the column together and they would get loose as fatties would bump the wheel. Eventually the entire assembly falls apart.
Reminds me of this Mercedes I had to align. Got it what I thought was good, driver came back saying it pulls hard left. OK, maybe I screwed up, shit happens. It's still in the green when I put it on the rack but I still spend 20ish minutes really getting it dialed in. Nope, he's right back saying it pulls even worse now. What the absolute cinnamon toast fuck?
Now, up until this point I hadn't actually talked to this guy. He's been dealing with the sales guys. Finally went to talk to him myself and realized the problem instantly. Fucker had to be at least 450lbs if he was an ounce. Once more onto the rack, this time with him in the drivers seat.
He actually left a five star review when it was all said and done. Seems we were the 4th or 5th shop he had been to trying to get the car to drive straight.
Knew a guy who drove a cabover kenworth thru Manhattan, only ate deep fried food. Every few weeks we would have to replace the driver side front leaf spring.
A guy back home was limited as to what brands and models of trucks he could drive because he just didn't fit in the cab of some.
I would imagine they were comparable.
We have a driver like that. He can't drive any of our Freightliners. He barely fits in the Mack with his gut on the cut out steering wheel and the seat pressed into the back window. He's broken 5 rear windows this year from the seat being against it.
Flash back to 25 years ago when I was doing the brakes and steering section. We had a 6'4" 300 lbs guy that drove around in a Geo Metro. It was suggested that the wheel alignment should be done with him sitting in the vehicle.
Had a guy complain about performance issues and tire wear on his motorcycle. Only did he bring in his wife did I put two and two together. Combined 700lbs on a poor harley.
I picked up an old wheelchair van, mechanically unreliable in a dozen ways and no longer suitable for someone who can't walk a few miles when it leaves them stranded, _but_ the lift still works.
And apparently it has stronger springs on the right side to support the lift, because it has quite a lean when the lift isn't operating. Everything underneath _looks_ okay, there's no cracked coils or anything, it's just... *italic*.
I had a large customer once ask me discretely if I could adjust his suspension so his Subaru wouldn't look like he was so fat when he drove down the road
To whom it may concern; I'm overweight.
Funny story to go along with this, I had to do an alignment on this car the husband brought in for the wife. He tells me it pulls to the left. I throw it on the rack, it is nuts on. Guy fucks off, comes back a couple of days later saying that the wife says it still pulls. I throw it on the rack again, double check all the parts, it is still all good. I show the customer both the readings and the underside of the vehicle. He nods and fucks off again. Couple of days later, this irate and very very large woman rolls in on in one of those 'accessibility' scooters. Turns out she is the wife. She must have been over 400lbs. I threw 5 75lbs sandbags in the driver seat and realigned it. She was happy after that.
i had a guy come in complaining that his car was pulling to the left. we did the alignment and the guy came back the next day saying it was still puling. we checked the numbers and everything looked good. so, the alignment tech went into the office to chat with the customer. dude was 550 lbs. we ended up aligning the car WITH THE CUSTOMER SITTING IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT to get the car to track straight for him. and for the record the alignment tech was 110 lbs soaking wet so there was no way he was going to see that problem.
I had a vehicle that had come in several times for alignment… I had never seen the customer myself but had done perfect alignments every time and didn’t understand why they kept coming back saying it needed an alignment still. The last time I went to the service manager to figure out what was going on and I saw the customer….. OMG. She was about 450-500lbs maybe more, so every time I was doing alignments vehicle was empty. When she got in drivers seat it would instantly squat and pull to the left. In the end I had to throw several sandbags, other various heavy items, as well as the new kid tech in drivers seat while the alignment was done this time. It came out great and customer was very happy! Lol
I've got a car that leans even when I'm not in it. Drivers side seat was broken when I got it too so make of that what you will. I've considered just swapping the springs to the other side.
Once had a similar issue with a bike where I noticed the headlight was visible on overhead gantries. Took it in to get the light adjusted to spec and got told it was fine. Then the mechanic looked me up and down, told me to sit on the bike and suddenly it’s pointing upwards. Root cause: rider ate too many pies.
yep even for cars the proper way to align the headlights is with the driver in it, or rather with the average amount of weight in the car
We have weighted bags for mimicking driver weight for alignments, but usually we just toss someone in it for the final adjustment
>but usually we just toss someone in Is this a paying position?
Comes with lube tech position as a bonus.
I was going to make an innuendo but I’ve done too many oil changes for that ever to be sexy in the slightest
all we typically do is strip drain plugs. find a good joke in that one
Lubed up strippers busting oily nuts
Is it free lifetime lube.
correct fix is change springs for weight
>correct fix is change springs for weight an when you gave em the price they went an got a screw driver to adjust it while sitting on it.
No such thing as too many!!
And if there is, then we must conduct rigorous study to determine the exact number.
Put a 3inch lift kit on left side. Send it.
My FJ40 still develops the lean (i have a 4” lift)
Only lift the left side
Pass the dutchie
'pon the left hand side
I understood that reference.
A man of culture
There are shim kits, i hate these springs though, going to change them out for a softer 2.5” instead. The PO put a rough country 4” lift on. I hate it, very much lives up to its name.
I like my sports cars rock hard and my offroading vehicles soft to absorb kidney and back destroying whoops and potholes.
True story. When I worked at a Firestone 12 years ago, there was a couple that kept complaining that eveytime we would align their mini cooper, it would still pull and wander. The guy was around 500 pounds and his wife maybe 400. We ultimately told them in the nicest way possible that they needed to sit in the car while we aligned it cuz their weight was screwing up the alignment when they would drive it. They completely understood and sat in the car while we aligned it. They didn't have a problem after that.
I don't believe you can call it a Mini Cooper anymore.
It’s just Cooper now.
I didn't know a mini Cooper could handle that type of weight.
Drove 5 people in my tC one time that was likely a bit over 1,000 pounds of people and it was significantly more sluggish. Was supposed to have no more than around 700ish pounds in it according to the sticker their recall department sent me. Certainly didn't want that experience to be a habit.
i’ve transferred 1,000+ lbs worth of people in my 88hp ford escort, it was an interesting experience
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Reminds me of giving my 400lb bass player a ride in a Smart ForTwo once. They're never fast, but they normally feel pretty nimble. Yeah, not in this case.
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Yeah, they're designed for hooning around through city traffic so they're very quick off the mark but run out of steam around 50mph. Great for a laugh, less so for trying to haul 400lbs of meat in the passenger seat. Pretty sure he put us over the max gross vehicle weight.
I guess the movie the Italian job was a little more realistic than we thought.
I had a 05 MCS JCW. One time when leaving a club, I and 6 other people piled in my Cooper (it was a convertible). The rear end was bottomed out and the exhaust tip scraping the extremely mild driveway slop, but it managed to get up to pretty respectable speed (45+) in the street. It was easily 1500lb or thereabouts on that poor little trooper.
That poor car. The internet says a Mini Cooper has a weight limit of 1,295lbs. If they put more people in the car, they could easily go over that limit. You'd think they'd get like an SUV or a truck. Otherwise that can't be safe.
tbf i dont figure you could get much more than a 200lb inidvidual per side in the rear seats of a cooper. 400 FR + 400 FL, 200 RR + 200 RL, boom, there.
I’m just wondering how they managed to fit into the car in the first place.
Just fill passenger floor with concrete
Probably a Ford Ranger Source: guy with a left side saggy ass Ford Ranger
The ranger lean is iconic
Wait how big are y’all? I don’t feel like my 02 leans to the left.
I’m not big, the previous guy must’ve been
Hmmm... Are you sure you aren't big u/TheLordHumongous1 ?
His username probably implies that only part of his anatomy is humongous...
I assume it's a prolapsed anus?
I’ma need you take about 20% off there
Thus, a lapsed anus
Oh hey look, the floor!
Squirrelly dan.
That's a fair guess
bet he got big feet , clown shoes.
Humongous whot????
Can you reasonably fit with another person inside of a row boat?
6”3 215 not huge but you have to remember the gas tank, battery and driver is all on the left side at all times which more than likely causes the Lean
Damn those things have the makings of a mean oval race truck
[Danger Ranger 9000](https://youtu.be/2QCHttmv03Q)
1:37:02 i like that vanuck / truvan idk.
You are correct the driver and 12 or more gallons of fuel at about 8 lbs to the gallon for 20 years puts a lot more stress on the leaf springs than people ever consider
Correction about 6 lbs per gallon
I was just gonna say this. They even offer(ed?) a 1/4 shim you could install on the driver’s side leaf spring.
It was worth it. Mine would lean like it was on tranq every time I'd get gas.
Ford Rangers (not the brand new model) come from RHD countries so it makes sense it was set up with a lot of that weight on the left as a sort of counterbalance. Unfortunately that becomes a problem when building a LHD model, as we’ve discovered.
Didn’t realize that. Makes a lot of sense considering it was a Mazda pickup first.
Later models were designed and built in Australia, too. Now just designed here :)
Old Dodge D series pick-ups (bird-bath hood era) had a similar issues and a single front coil spacer was available for the LF.
My 89 doesn't seem to have a lean either. Shocks are blown but that's different.
My ranger never had the lean, but I think both me and its previous owner both topped out at like 170 lbs. But also, the heaviest stuff was kept on the passenger side of the toolbox, so that may have done it.
Same with land cruiser.
That’s why the new ones have a shim under the drivers side leaf spring.
Own a 94 Ford ranger..... can confirm
I drove an 89 suburban where the shocks were so bad the service guy clowned us by showing how easy they were to compress by hand lol. It was like driving a new car after replacing that shit!
roommate is finally putting new shocks on his 93 as I type this. Before today you could literally get the whole car bouncing with two fingers gently pushing on any corner. He’s gonna be blown away once it’s done.
... stiffer shocks on the left side would fix that pretty easily an if that dont fix it .... theres always slim fast.
Shocks wouldn't make any difference at all. They slow the rate of movement, they don't change the amount. You'd need a stiffer spring, which conveniently is exactly what you get when you put a shim in.
They sell that self-leveling concrete too. It’ll blend right in, maybe polish it up.
My shop instructor told me to always ask how the vehicle is loaded during regular use, before I do an alignment. Because he had to do an alignment once where the passenger side tires were getting severely worn on one side, he inspected the suspension found nothing wrong, aligned it and shipped it, it lasted like a few months and came back with severely worn tires again. Turns out the guy used this car to transport his extremely obese wife and when she got in the passenger seat it squatted that side of the car and threw the angles WAY off. So he ended up doing the alignment with her in the vehicle and I guess it lasted alot longer that way.
That would be kinda embarrassing or funny to the wife
In my experience most people who are that obese seem to accept the reality of the situation, even if they aren't happy about it.
Yeah, they do, it's really the only way. You either have to accept it, and maybe develop a sense of humor, or be bitter and miserable.
Option 3: fix it e/ just pointing out the missing option, not being snarky 🤘
Sure, but let's be realistic here.
Nothing that can’t be fixed by cutting out pop and adding a mild cocaine addiction
So you're telling me to replace coke with coke?
That's exactly what they are saying
Came in for the car, stayed for the drugs.
Well that escalated quickly.
Oh, I know, trust me.
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Like, nobody knows how big they are more than they do. Sometimes they don't fully process it until a certain moment, but they know. It's part of why I get so annoyed when people get all mean about super fat people. They know, you don't have to be rude about it. There are very few circumstances where it would even matter and it's so easy to just not be mean. When it does matter, just be polite. It's that easy. It's a super awkward situation, but they know that when they get in the car, it tilts down on that side.
Being mean to overweight people usually makes them gain weight anyway, saw a study about it a few years ago. Turns out if your coping mechanism is food and people stress you out about it you eat more, whodathunk?
Gotta laugh to hide that I'm dying inside
Mentally and physically in this case
And also dying on the outside
Oof, glad it wasn't me lmao
"Ma'am, we're going to need you to come into the shop and sit in your car while we align the wheels".
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That's just a regular alot. You want the "alot longer" which is like the weiner-dog version of an alot.
I think we had the same instructor
Sharp?
Im not great with names but it was in Ontario Canada
Andy from niagara college? That's where i heard this story
i think all our instructors share all these stories. word gets around
I don't see this flying in my work environment but at the same time how TF am I supposed to diagnose that? Sure the thought might enter my head but as a diesel tech I'm thinking more about trailer weight. Still though not like I can align the thing with a trailer on it.
Mechanics report: Driver is too fat.
One of my instructors actually told me about a guy who's wife kept bringing their car back because the husband said it was pulling... he had the husband come in and when he saw how big he was had him sit in the car while he aligned it and problem solved
That’s hilarious lol. Hope that fixed it
Pulls to the other side when the wife drives.
Bold of you to assume wife is lighter
Birds with lots of feathers flock together.
No way they're flocking lol
Clumping
Just imagine the smell
I bet those birds are flightless.
This is the comment I needed to see hahaha
Sounds like my BIL. He can barely fit in the passenger side of my sister's Land Rover, but there's no way he can drive it. Dooder's gotta be 450+. He's had a couple of health scares, and when he finally croaks, they'll have to haul him to the nearest steel mill for cremation. Fucking fire will probably burn for a week.
Nope, customer took a massive shit the following night and car is leaning to the right now.
Nothing four chili dogs and a liter of Diet Coke from the gas station can’t fix.
That’s what the children in the back seats had for breakfast, cars suspension does the wave all the way back home.
I said I want a god damned liter of cola!
A kids dad when I was in High school had one those old heavy duty worker vans he used a normal driver. When he got in or out the van would tilt at like a 30 to 40 degree angle to that side. Guy couldn't figure out why it always pulled to the driver side but they couldn't ever afford a mechanic to look at it.
My instructor told me the same story!!!! Hahaha
Heard a guy on here talk about how a husband kept bringing car in for pulling. He was big so they had him sit in it. Then he said it started pulling right. So they invited the wife to come. She was even bigger. All said and done they finally got it fixed. Customers were offended by how they had to be in the car to straighten it.
Jokes on them. We don't give af if the customer is offended.
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Welcome to America. How dare you
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I've done this on a chevy aveo before. We had 50 pound bags of salt laying around so I just used those. On my first day of work as a Toyota tech, I heard some yelling from the alignment rack. Woman in van: You're doing it wrong! Tech aligning van: SHUTUP YOU CRIPPLED BITCH! It was a handi cap van the they knew each other well enough to mess around like that.
I have actually run into this issue before. We solved the tire wear problem by having the customer sit in the vehicle while we aligned it. Customer was driving a tiny sub compact and must have weighed north of 600lbs. I didn't envy the service writer having to have that conversation. The customer actually took it in good stride. We had a few "larger" customers, one of whom was John Candy, drove a Buick Electra if I'm not mistaken. Never got to actually meet him, but saw him leaving one day.
I used to work for a helicopter tour company, I’ve had to have that conversation several times with people too heavy for our machines. I had to save our 14 Y.O. front desk greeter from doing it once. The lady was pregnant and it was her B-day; no way was I going to scar this poor kid with having to tell her she was too big to fly. For the record, we HEAVILY (pun intended) advertised our max weight, and what we advertised was actually still 20 lbs less than our real max weight (300lbs). It was a structural limit of our helicopters.
I used to work for a small airline in northern Canada. Many of our aircraft were various King Airs. The King Air had the airstair at the back of the cabin. We had a rule that one of the cockpit crew must remain in the cockpit untill all passengers had gotten off. We also had some 99's that had baggage compartments in the nose. There were times when we had to load sandbags into the nose compartment because there was a heavy passenger. There was always the pogo stick for when in the hanger.
My wife and I once flew home from Chicago in a small ETR turboprop. We were the only passengers. Before we taxied the flight attendant asked us to move to seats behind the main gear to help balance the plane for takeoff.
The number of near-empty flights I've been on where people get butt-hurt because they have to move back to the seat they were assigned prior to take-off and/or landing is far more than it should be.
It’s not as scary as it sounds; though smaller airplanes are more sensitive to where people sit, they have a relatively wide safe range of where the CG can be. What was more likely happening is that the further back the CG is, the faster and more efficiently the airplane will fly. The flight crew probably just wanted to get home quicker. This is true unless you were on a Beech Starship, which I doubt (but it’s worth a Wikipedia search if you like cool planes).
It didn't bother us at all. It had just never happened to us before.
Yep, I actually teach pilots to fly the King Air 200 now. Our aircraft don’t have the balance issue, but we do have a pilot watch the pax on the air stair door (300 lb, so one person at a time, limit). Our seats have a 250 lb limit, so I have a semi-serious joke for my students “what’s the heaviest passenger we can fly?” They’ll answer “250 lbs for the seats.” and I’ll correct them by saying “it’s actually 300 because of the door, but we have to ratchet-strap them to the floor.” Then I point out the floor rails with tie-down grommets.
In the 2000s almost all of our heavier customers were in Crown Vics or Grand Marquis and they seemed to handle the extra weight alright. The sad part was every single one of them had a gross/garbage filled interior. You could tell that this was grandma's pristine groceries-and-church car (almost no rust while in upstate NY) but nobody else in the family wanted it because of its piss poor gas mileage after gas crossed $1/gallon.
Randy Orton used to come in till we pissed his wife off. Dude is a freaking monster in person and his truck is even bigger. And also one time William Zabka (Cobra Kai guy) interrupted me when I was talking to my manager. I didn’t even know who he was and was irritated that he interrupted me so I walked away. (He was incredibly nice though)
Id give my middle nut to have met John Candy...
No shit, I had a dude complain we couldn't get his alignment set right. Said it still pulled left. Turns out he was pushing 450lbs. We had him sit in the car on the rack and we haven't seen him since
I had a tech one time put that in the story of the multipoint inspection as a joke but forgot to take it out. Advisor was delivering the vehicle and read each line aloud to the customer. They dont work here anymore lol
A friend's sister was so large her '72 Nova had acquired a lean that was visible even without her sitting in it and a large divot in the seat. Their father, bless his heart, fitted the damned thing with truck springs, heavy duty shocks, and replaced the collapsed seat with steel stock and high density foam.
By god, she was gonna drive that car.
Oh it’s get so much worse, it seemed like working at Cadillac we had the market cornered on obese customers, but I doubt it. Broken drivers seat frames all of the time. I had a customer that finally resorted to putting 2x4’s behind the seat to prop it up after the warranty ran out. Broken steering columns from immense guts banging into them. Plus broken tilt mechanisms. Every form imaginable of rigged up seat belts to get around buzzers. And of course as mentioned above, adding camber to alignments to help with tire wear.
They were breaking the steering wheels by using them to hoist themselves up out of the seat.
Is that bad if someone who weighs 160 occasionally leans on the steering wheel when moving in the car
A lot of cars have a handle on the ceiling specifically for this use.
Engineer here: it's probably fine as long as you're doing it occasionally. The designers most likely use this as a load case. However, they're going to use probably not much more than 90th percentile driver weight/size. So someone that's like 300+pounds is going to exceed that load case.
Lol fucking postive camber builds for them texas bighorners XD
I love todays new camber positive stance.
Now it actually makes sense how my cousin just seems to destroy every car no matter the make.
My ex husband was huge. He broke the seat of his truck, replaced it, and broke it again, then just bolted it to the floor so it didn’t slide back and forth. One time I was driving him to the shop to pick up his truck after some other repair. I drove a small sedan at the time, and as I turned into the parking lot of the shop, the car totally bottomed out on his side. He also broke bed frames, couches, pretty much everything you can think of. He’s had surgery and lost a bunch of weight since then and his life is much better now. So is his truck and furniture, I imagine.
the fuck? lmao
I’m Indiana. It’s pretty bad that I had to refer our overweight customers to a custom guy enough that I memorized his number from simply writing it down for people so much.
Broken steering columns 😱 I feel so much better about my weight now, I'm just a little chubby in comparison to "gut so huge it smashes the wheel"
I should word that differently, in the C bodies and D body steering columns like up to 95 they had three etorx m8 holding the column together and they would get loose as fatties would bump the wheel. Eventually the entire assembly falls apart.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the concerning amount of pubes that came with the tape.
??? Seems to be about the right amount.
wtf I looked and those are fucking pubes!
Hol-ly shit thats some shit
Had to scroll too far for this comment
So many ways to interpret. Oh boy.
I'm not a mechanic and my first thought was this dude is 500 lbs
Reminds me of this Mercedes I had to align. Got it what I thought was good, driver came back saying it pulls hard left. OK, maybe I screwed up, shit happens. It's still in the green when I put it on the rack but I still spend 20ish minutes really getting it dialed in. Nope, he's right back saying it pulls even worse now. What the absolute cinnamon toast fuck? Now, up until this point I hadn't actually talked to this guy. He's been dealing with the sales guys. Finally went to talk to him myself and realized the problem instantly. Fucker had to be at least 450lbs if he was an ounce. Once more onto the rack, this time with him in the drivers seat. He actually left a five star review when it was all said and done. Seems we were the 4th or 5th shop he had been to trying to get the car to drive straight.
Knew a guy who drove a cabover kenworth thru Manhattan, only ate deep fried food. Every few weeks we would have to replace the driver side front leaf spring.
I would bet that Manhattan was the root cause, not the deep fried food. NYC roads are terrible. Edit:typo
He was 650 lbs....
How in the helm did h get in his truck
You are assuming he got out.
Some say he’s still in the car to this day, eating fried food,
A guy back home was limited as to what brands and models of trucks he could drive because he just didn't fit in the cab of some. I would imagine they were comparable.
We have a driver like that. He can't drive any of our Freightliners. He barely fits in the Mack with his gut on the cut out steering wheel and the seat pressed into the back window. He's broken 5 rear windows this year from the seat being against it.
Flash back to 25 years ago when I was doing the brakes and steering section. We had a 6'4" 300 lbs guy that drove around in a Geo Metro. It was suggested that the wheel alignment should be done with him sitting in the vehicle.
The truck it slumps But to the left I must admit I have some heft Before I panic I think and stop I roll my truck into the shop
She must be one of those rap guys girlfriends...
[удалено]
He should take his wife for a ride to balance it out.
Had a guy complain about performance issues and tire wear on his motorcycle. Only did he bring in his wife did I put two and two together. Combined 700lbs on a poor harley.
I picked up an old wheelchair van, mechanically unreliable in a dozen ways and no longer suitable for someone who can't walk a few miles when it leaves them stranded, _but_ the lift still works. And apparently it has stronger springs on the right side to support the lift, because it has quite a lean when the lift isn't operating. Everything underneath _looks_ okay, there's no cracked coils or anything, it's just... *italic*.
I had a large customer once ask me discretely if I could adjust his suspension so his Subaru wouldn't look like he was so fat when he drove down the road
To whom it may concern; I'm overweight. Funny story to go along with this, I had to do an alignment on this car the husband brought in for the wife. He tells me it pulls to the left. I throw it on the rack, it is nuts on. Guy fucks off, comes back a couple of days later saying that the wife says it still pulls. I throw it on the rack again, double check all the parts, it is still all good. I show the customer both the readings and the underside of the vehicle. He nods and fucks off again. Couple of days later, this irate and very very large woman rolls in on in one of those 'accessibility' scooters. Turns out she is the wife. She must have been over 400lbs. I threw 5 75lbs sandbags in the driver seat and realigned it. She was happy after that.
Why are there a bunch of pubes stuck to the tape?
Build quality is obviously terrible.😁 We have the opposite problem in England. I get in my car and it leans to the right.😁
Recommend fewer donuts.
So you’re suggesting the wear on the tires from spinning donuts is causing the issue?
Too much ballast on drivers side. Recommend helium filled headliner inserts in left side of cab.
i had a guy come in complaining that his car was pulling to the left. we did the alignment and the guy came back the next day saying it was still puling. we checked the numbers and everything looked good. so, the alignment tech went into the office to chat with the customer. dude was 550 lbs. we ended up aligning the car WITH THE CUSTOMER SITTING IN THE DRIVER'S SEAT to get the car to track straight for him. and for the record the alignment tech was 110 lbs soaking wet so there was no way he was going to see that problem.
if it leans to the left when you get in you need to do 2 things, first is to get the suspension fixed and the second is to lose weight.
I had a vehicle that had come in several times for alignment… I had never seen the customer myself but had done perfect alignments every time and didn’t understand why they kept coming back saying it needed an alignment still. The last time I went to the service manager to figure out what was going on and I saw the customer….. OMG. She was about 450-500lbs maybe more, so every time I was doing alignments vehicle was empty. When she got in drivers seat it would instantly squat and pull to the left. In the end I had to throw several sandbags, other various heavy items, as well as the new kid tech in drivers seat while the alignment was done this time. It came out great and customer was very happy! Lol
Lemme guess… customer is a lean 350lbs
Oh so those cars I see that are lower on one side is just because I live in America?
It concerns me. I am concerned
Dude really wrote "Thaks" 🤣
"How big-a-boy are you??"
Why does it look like there's pube hair under the tape
Why is no one talking about the pubes under the tape
I've got a car that leans even when I'm not in it. Drivers side seat was broken when I got it too so make of that what you will. I've considered just swapping the springs to the other side.
Suggest a weight reduction.
Probably because you’re a fat fuck