[Richard]

At the time, I recommended the 3/16 to Chester, that was the best info I could gather based on recommendations from the manufacturer on our front end, Prevost recommendations, and my own experience.

I now use 1/16 as my preferred setting.

Since I made that recommendation, I took a summer of travel and experimented with everything from 1/8 to zero toe. 1/16 worked the best for me. Now I have to explain how I did this at the risk of boring you to tears. Almost all alignments are done on an alignment rack where the front tires rest on plates that are free to rotate and slide side to side. I did mine as a “rolling” alignment. As the front end is toed in, the tires generate an inward force. The purpose of toe in is to take advantage of that inward force and preload any looseness in all the mechanisms. Depending upon the tolerance in the system, the rolling toe can be quite different than the static toe. I would make the small adjustment I wanted by twisting the tie rod end, and then lower the coach to the ground, and roll forward about 20 feet. Then I would take my homemade trammel bar and measure the toe as it exists when the coach rolls down the road.

Why do that? One, because it gives you the toe in setting as the coach rolls. Two, I have paid for many alignments. Even one by one of the the most highly recommended outfits in the country. After having the alignment done, I would not be happy with how the coach held the road. When I measured the toe in with my crude setup, I could not believe some of the measurements I would see, so I ended up undoing what the alignment shop did. Setting the toe in is not rocket surgery.

If you want a eye opening confirmation of what I am saying, then take 20 minutes and a tape measure to run this experiment. The 365 tires have a very nice groove at the inside edge that will catch the hook of the tape measure. Run it from inside groove to inside groove. Record both back and front measurements on the tires. The difference gives you the toe in. Now, drive the coach forward 20 ft, and measure again. Now drive it backward 20 ft and measure again. Note the dramatic change in toe in.

The point being that the 1/16 that I prefer is rolling toe. I would tell the alignment shop to use that number also, but I would check the rolling toe after the work was done to ensure the coach wasn’t actually toed out. Toed out will cause the coach to dart from side to side. Well as much as a 50k beasts can dart.