My front tires are fine but my rears are showing wear on the inside.My rears look like this from the rear // \\.I thought only the front tires feathered.

 

Your rear toe settings could be out of spec. Have your dealer do an alignment check. The Z has a very sophisticated 4 wheel independent suspension. All 4 wheels have to be aligned properly or you will get abnormal wear on your tires, either front and/or back.

BTW, the rear tires will wear on the inside first, because the camber angle is the top of the tire leans in some to give that great handling. I would expect the rear inside of the rear tires to wear out first. How many miles do you have on your OE tires, you still have them? If you have 12-15,000 miles, I would consider your rear tires are worn out, unless an alignment check shows your rear tires are out of spec.

 

I have 2000 miles,95% highway miles.

 

I would advise you to get an alignment immediately. That is abnormal wear and you have too few miles to warrant such wear.

 

Since you're doing mostly highway miles, and not a lot of hard cornering, have your alignment folks reduce the negative rear camber (wheels won't tilt in at the top as much) a bit (-1.5 to -1.6 versus the more common -1.8 or -1.9). The Z's camber settings are a compromise between performance cornering and straightaway (highway type) driving. Toe-in can also be minimized a wee bit for mostly highway driving (0.01 or so). The idea is for the settings to maximize the road tire contact patch based on the type of driving you typically do.

Camber is mostly for cornering due body roll, and toe-in/out is for cornering understeer/oversteer and high speed stability.

Keep an eye on your tire inflation too!

 

Thanks for the responses,I have an appointment at the dealer for first checkup and will use Tere's specs.

 

What I'd recommend (presuming you have a top notch suspension specialist) is to explain to the specialist what kind of driving you do most often and ask if it can be tuned to that sort of driving. That way you stroke the ego a bit and get better service. Since it's your first time in, I'd also ask for all the suspension bolts to be checked for proper torque -- bolts on new cars sometimes have a nasty habit of working loose.

 

Sorry for the delay in getting back to all of you. I missed one week of inspections so I went in last Friday with 1,000 miles on my new front tires. Had them miked at the dealer.

I also went out and bought my own depth gauge at NAPA for $5.00.

Results:

No unven wear or feathering. I am tesing my own tires, too. I am checking all tread blocks from outside to middle to inside. Both front and back of the tread blocks. So far so good.

Tell tale signs of road noise are non existant and no visual wear signs.

SM agreed that this is a good sign but figures 500 more miles will tell the truth.

One thing I did not do was to see if the tread wear is lower on the inside edge from the middle tread blocks. I was looking more for the feathering on the tread blocks. I will check tonight.

Fingers crossed!

eZchief

 

Thanks ezchief. Please tell us one more time how many miles do you have on the car total and;

how many miles are you doing for your test after your alignment.

There are a LOT of people who are VERY interested. Boomer

 

ya, ME being one of them!!

 

I have had the tire flip done and have been approved for a set of new tires. But as many have encountered, the new tires are on back-order! In the mean time, I have been riding with the old tires on the opposite wheels. Now I have about 8000mls and am noticing feathering on the inside of both wheels again. To elaborate, now I have feathering on the outside blocks of tread and on the inside blocks. So obviously, the alignment didn't fix the problem!
The back-order situation has bought me some time and some insight on what would have happened if we had installed the new tires. Have they come even close to getting a fix on this problem? I need to know before the new tires arrive! (even if I have to go with after-market).
Q: Does it matter if you have 18" wheels or 17" wheels as to who is having this problem?


needing help,
calvin

SS,6mt,clear bra,touring,7"wide screen,dvd,LED's

 

I have 13,651 miles on the car total. Fronts were replaced 1,000 miles ago. The SM and Hunter say the wear pattern will show at 1,500 miles. At the rate of my commute, I assume that I will hit 1,500 miles next week. I am going to check with the SM to see if he wants the car to take over to Hunter for a day for analysis. I will let you know if they want it by the end of the week.

One more note. My SM still checks in with NNA once a week to see if they have a fix and so far......nothing. They are interested in his test for sure.

Keep you posted.

 

Thanks for the update! I'm glad to hear the SM is staying active on this.

 

Has anyone put any significant mileage on modified suspension setups, like S-tune and Eibach? Is there a general consensus that altering the suspension alleviates the feathering?

 

The only things I've read about the S-Tune or Eibachs alleviating is the bounce. The feathering is an alignment problem, two very different issues. All additions to your suspension seem to indicate you must realign it when you add new components.

I, and several others, have come to the conclusion all our Zs need to be realigned because the shipping process knocked most, if not all our Zs out of alignment, thereby starting the process of feathering. A few dealers have done alignments on all the Zs they have received in their allotments to make sure no abnormal wear patterns develop,ie. like the feathering.

 

At a bit over 27,000 miles, I may have one of the highest mile Z's on the forum. I purchased my Z Oct. 29 and just returned from a near 9,000 mile, 5 week road trip this past Thursday.
My oem Bridgestone set had terrible feathering @ 4k miles. The dealer (finally) agreed to replace the oem's @ 14k after trying the align & flip non-solution.
At that point I replaced the 17" wheels and tires w/18" and switched to Nitto 555 Extremes w/245 front and 275 rear. At the same time I installed the Eibach's and so I cannot guage which mod did what for the tire wear issue.
I have been feeling pretty good throughout this period of change, but this morning my balloon burst.
My car has never had any pull in either direction and with the aftermarket exhaust I failed to hear the subtle increase in tire noise brought on by feathering.
I just went out and shot some pix and now see the dreaded feathering has returned to my "Marilyn."
The good news is that the wear you see here is from nearly 15,000 miles of which 9,000 was pretty much straight line high speed interstate usage. Also, the wear is pretty minimal so far, when compared to the awful feathering @ 4k miles on the Bridgestones. My guess is that I can easily go another 10k and even more if I flip the tires.
So, what is my guess? I dunno'. Too many changes together to narrow it down, but I have a gut feeling (based on most miles behind the wheel of a Z?) that the Eibach's have a major part in holding off premature wear and secondly the Nitto compound helping. Of course, the alignment didn't hurt either, but this is my best guess.
So, in the end, 25-30,000 miles on the front set of Nitto's is realistic for me and the rears look brand new @ 15,000 and I would expect near 35-40,000 easily and this includes dragstrip runs a couple of times a month.
Disappointed? No, (despite subject title!) though I wish this feathering was a non-existent problem, I can deal with 30,000 miles up front and 40,000 out back on this type of car with my kind of driving. Regards, Jim

 

I was pretty amazed at how uniform your feathering is on every tread block. Mine, and most I have seen, was a hit and skip pattern over a few tread blocks then repeating. Could this be the eibachs?

As I study your tire more, it appears the front of the block hits and as the wheel rotates it takes more of the tire.

When you had your alignment, what was your toe spec after the adjustment if I can ask. Mine went to .07 L and .07 R for a total of .14.

Just curious.

And damn that is alot of miles!

 

I should have elaborated a little. Some one we all know, Droid, suggested months ago that the car bounce lifts our car slighly off the ground and slams it back down causing the skip feathering we all see. The eibachs seem to have cured that. Droid elaborated a few pages back in this thread.

Did the eibachs help?

Just my $.02

 

I had the alignment done at 4000 miles with the tire swap so for me it is still to early to tell if the problem is still there. But after looking at other cars, I am coming to the conclusion that many cars have some sort of issue with abnormal tire wear. My wife’s 2001 Pathfinder’s front tires are wearing faster on the outside edges. Also I know someone who just got a 2003 Accord, and could not have more then a few thousand miles on it, and I can notice the outside of both front tires starting to feather. I think dealers need to take the incentive to align all cars as part of the delivery process. Also I think that cars that have a staggered wheel/tire set up like the Z are at a disadvantage since you cannot rotate the wheels. Might just be that an alignment needs to be done on a regular basis and watch out for those potholes

Just my .02

 

Got my car aligned & swapped... thought I'd post the info.

VIN: 6616
Model: 6sp Touring (18in Wheels)
Build Date: 10/03


Toe Before:
Front Left: 0.01in
Front Right: -0.05in
Front Total Toe: -0.04in

Toe After:
Front Left: 0.03in
Front Right: 0.03in
Front Total Toe: 0.06in

Noise has decreased substantially. The tires are/were feathered. I figure that in a few thousand the noise will start again, I'll complain to NNA & get new tires.

Other observations...
Car seems to be solid again... it was squirelly (sp?) at highway speed this is no longer the case. There's no pulling either.

Someone I work with (he used to own a TVR Griffon with a track setup). Anyway... he made a suggestion about the suspension being mismatched, but he said that it sounded like a front back issue vs. a shock spring mismatch. He gave me a couple of suggestions of how to flush this out and he's checking a few of his tuning books. If I find out anything usefull I'll post it.