Why the Same Shop Should Fit Your Tires and Align Them

The day new tires go on is the best day they'll ever look. From there, every mile either wears them down evenly, the way they're supposed to wear, or wears them down unevenly because something in the alignment wasn't right when they went on. Which one happens depends less on the tires themselves and more on what happened in the bay the same afternoon they were mounted.

What "we'll send that out" really means

A lot of tire shops around Houma don't own an alignment rack. They'll sell a set, mount it, balance it, and tell you the alignment is a separate stop, sometimes a different business across town, sometimes a wait of a few days while you're already driving on the new rubber. By the time that appointment happens, the tires have already put miles into whatever pattern the old alignment was setting up. You end up paying to correct a problem that started wearing into brand new tires before anyone even looked at it.

What's actually sitting on our floor

We don't sublet alignments because we don't have to. There's a Hunter drive-on alignment rack built into the shop, with a Hunter road force wheel balancer right beside it, and a Challenger two-post lift for everything else that needs to come off the ground. Same building, same crew, same afternoon. A set of tires goes on and the alignment gets checked and set before the truck leaves, not scheduled for later down the road.

The wall behind the counter

Walk into the showroom and the brand wall tells you what we actually stock and stand behind: Cooper, Mastercraft, including their Courser HSX Tour and Courser MXT lines, Dick Cepek, Mickey Thompson, Falken, Delinte and Hercules. That's a spread built for daily drivers and work trucks both, on-road commuters and the lifted trucks that are everywhere in this part of the state. We're also an authorized MotoFab Lifts dealer for leveling kits and wheel spacers, which matters here more than most places, since a leveled or lifted truck needs its alignment reset to match the new geometry, not just left on the old numbers.

What a customer actually noticed

One review that's stuck with us came from Zage Billiot, who wrote, "These guys squeezed me in even as busy as they are, and were reasonable on pricing and care for your motor vehicle like as if it's their own personals." That's the point of doing tires and alignment under one roof. It isn't two transactions with two shops guessing at each other's work. It's one crew that fits the tire, sets the alignment, and stands behind both.

Since 1977

Bailey's Tire Service has been on St Charles Street doing this since 1977. That's long enough to have watched trends in trucks and tires come and go, and long enough to know that a tire fitted right and aligned right the same day is the difference between a set that wears out in years and one that wears out in months.

Everything else gets a look while it's up in the air

Once a truck is on the Challenger two-post lift for a set of tires, that's also the easiest time to catch anything else going on underneath. Brakes, shocks, CV shafts, the chassis and steering components, they're all right there while the wheels are already off, instead of waiting for a separate visit later to find a problem that was visible the whole time. We built the shop this way on purpose. It's the same reason our own hiring paperwork asks every technician about chassis and steering inspection and diagnosing drivability issues alongside tire installation, because we don't treat those as separate jobs done by separate people in separate bays.

One visit instead of three

For a lot of customers that means one trip covers the tires, the alignment, and a real look at whatever else the truck needs, brakes that are getting thin, a shock that's starting to leak, an oil change that's due. It's slower to run a shop that way than to just mount tires and send everyone out the door, but it's the difference between fixing a problem once and fixing it three separate times because nobody looked past the one thing you came in for.

What we check before you drive off

• Tire size, load rating and speed rating matched to the vehicle before anything gets mounted
• Wheel torque set and rechecked after the first miles
• Alignment measured and corrected on our own rack, not scheduled elsewhere
• TPMS relearn run so the dash reads correctly on the new setup

Walk in

First come, first served, Monday through Thursday 7:30 to 4:30, Friday 7:30 to 4:00, closed weekends. Call (985) 876-5082 to check we've got your size, or just drive in and we'll get you in the queue.