OK, jumping in finally for my first post. I will shortly be buying new tires for my '03 Cooper S and will likely switch away from the runflats. I'd never put new tires on ANY car without also doing a wheel alignment. My question: Can I trust a reputable tire dealer to do my wheel alignment? Or is there something magically special that only the MINI dealer can do correctly? Frankly, I save my dealer trips for the last resort due to the expense.
Thanks, gurus!
-Xcellorator in South Florida

 

If your car is stock then only front toe can be adjusted. Rear toe can be changed, but it requires that they loosen the trailing arm pivot point, something a little to involved for a regular alignment, and was meant for a single time change during construction - moving it later can put stress onto the rear control arms. Since your car is an '03, the rear camber cannot be changed. On later 1st gens, there was some adjustability built into the mounting bolts for the control arms back there. As with any production car, front camber and caster aren't adjustable without the right camber plates.

The point is, any tire shop that claims alignment capabilities can do the front toe on MINIs.

 

My dealer charges $120 for a four wheel alignment, which isnt too bad. they also do it "under equal load," meaning all 4 seats have dead weight on them when the alignment is performed. not sure whether reg tire shops do that.

 

I use my normal tire store to perform the wheel alignments in my Mini. They even spent the extra time to adjust the rear toe which was a pain for them (kind of a trial and error process).

As stated, for your car, only the front toe and rear toe are adjustable, with the rear toe being a pain to adjust. The front camber, front caster, and rear camber are not adjustable without adding aftermarket parts.

You can go two different routes because most shops will do a 2 wheel or 4 wheel alignment, with the 4 wheel costing more. My shop charges $60 vs $100. I get 4 wheel alignments because I have added aftermarket parts to allow more adjustability.

1) If you want to make sure that everything is in spec even though most of the front and rear alignment measurements are not adjustable on your car you could pay for the 4 wheel alignment. That way they will check everything, however they can only adjust front toe and rear toe. If you want to go this route check with the shop to make sure they will even adjust the rear toe if it is out of spec (they might not want to deal with it and might say it needs a special tool, which it does not).
2) Assume the rear is in spec (probably is unless you have hit something pretty hard) and only get a 2 wheel alignment. They will then measure front toe, camber, and caster but can only adjust the front toe.