Lets say the contact happened on the left front wheel and the toe is screwed up. Would it affect the toe on the right side also? It happened to my car and it appears that nothing was bent. Is it possible that the steering rack got pushed, "skip a teeth" and thus affected the toe on BOTH sides?

After I set the toe straight, the car drives fine again. It just puzzled me that why the contact on one side would affect the opposite side. Any idea?

 

annie won?

 

Skip a tooth? No. Whether or not a hit on one side shows up as a change on the other depends on how the person doing the measuring "zeros" the steering before taking the measurements. If you roll the car along and let it self-center, the change will be averaged to some degree between the wheels. If the rack is exactly where it was when the toe was set before the prang, the change would only be measured on one side. If you were there when the alignment was done, you would probably have noticed that the last step was removing and centering the steering wheel, to adjust for the fact that the rack is now in a different place when things are pointed "straight ahead."

K