Trailer Alignment in Lacey, WA

A highway van trailer leads an easy life compared with the trailers working out of this area: aggregate and dump trailers, equipment floats, log trailers, and anything that gets loaded on uneven ground.

Those take their punishment in two ways. Uneven loading twists the frame over time, and unsealed access roads deliver impacts through axles and suspension that a paved yard never would.

Neither announces itself. The driver up front feels essentially nothing, because a trailer running out of line is not something a tractor transmits.

The national trailer alignment page lists the signs. The complication on a trailer working unsealed ground is that it collects damage from the surface as well, so a tire can be scrapped for a cut rather than for wear and the underlying alignment problem never gets counted.

Look at the ones that wore out rather than the ones that were cut, and the pattern separates itself.

A trailer carries most of the weight in a combination and runs more tires than the tractor, so it loses more rubber per mile to the same fault.

Axle alignment to the kingpin, the relationship between axles on a tandem or tri-axle, and the suspension and mounting hardware holding it together.

Lacey also aligns heavy trucks, and measuring the combination rather than one end of it is the only way to settle which is at fault. For a fleet with fixed pairings, doing both at once gives a baseline to compare against later.

Trailer positions retread well when they wear evenly, and Lacey collects casings for the Purcell plant in Portland.

A trailer running out of line scrubs one shoulder away, which costs the tire and the casing under it. An aligned trailer keeps feeding the retread program; a misaligned one quietly stops.

The Lacey store carries trailer tires and every other Purcell category, and is managed by Darren Soares. Renton and Monroe also align trailers.

See the national trailer alignment page for all 36 locations.