I just discovered that my front tires are wearing very unevenly, which I assume is an alignment problem, but it seems odd that my alignment would be that bad. I recently had my steering wheel replaced. Is it possible for that to have affected the alignment?

Near full tread on the outside edges, near bald on the inside. Rear tires seem okay. 2004 Volvo S60R. "Spirited" driving, but I'm not taking it on tracks or anything. I do like to take corners hard.

If it is the same on both sides, I would suspect the settings for toe-in or camber, which on many (most? all?) should be adjustable. Mine do this slightly because I have altered my toe-in to Prodrive specs - gives better cornering precision, but wears tread faster. My garage did that bit for free while it was in for a service - took about 10 minutes.

that might suggest over inflation.
what do you set the pressure at?
are they rotated often?

alignment and hard driving normally take out the outer edge.

It's not quite the same on both sides. The driver's side is a little better off than the passenger side. I considered the fact that it might be a camber issue, but this is the second pair of tires on the car (apparently the OEM tires were made of pencil eraser rubber) and the first pair wore pretty evenly. Now that I think about it, they may have been a little more worn on the inside, but not to this extent. The current tires literally look a few weeks old from the outside, but the inside is basically bald.

damn!
I didn't understand correctly.
I thought you said the inner and outer edges were fine, that the center was shot.
my bad.

have the aliment checked and ignore my tire inflation comment.

out of curiosity, why did you need to replace the steering wheel?

My two "fun" cars now have Kumho tires on them since I was blowing through costly Pirellis like crazy. The Viggen now has Kumho Ecsta Supra 712 and I think, for the price, they're great. The compound seems much harder than the Pirelli P6000. So far they've been on the car for about 20,000 miles and still look reasonably new. Their handling in the rain is not as good though.

The SVX has Kumho Ecsta 711. They're almost cheaper than dirt and still look new after 30,000 miles. I'm more confident in those, but that's probably due to the SVX being AWD.

After not being washed for a while, I notice the Kumhos start to look a bit brownish. If I apply some Stoner Tire Shine, they're returned to black for a good while. I'm not exactly sure what that's about.

What you are describing is a toe out condition. The front of the tires are farther apart than the rear.

I'll bet your steering is twitchey fast. Tending to pull either left or right and with little or no tendency to stay on center. The tire wear and the twitchey steering go together.

You said your steering wheel was replaced, did you intend to mean that the steering box was replaced? To accomplish that replacment, the mechanic has to dis/re-connect the rods that attach the wheel spindles to the steering box (tie rods). That will impact the wheel alignment. Except that a competent mechanic knows to take care of that.

What probably happened is you hit a largish pot hole at speed. That stresses the toe in adjustment somewhat.

It's literally a 10 minute repair, if you do it yourself with a tape measure.

Older Volvoes (like the 240) would have to hit other cars to bother the alignment.

Yeah, it doesn't have a lot of desire to stay on center. The steering is tight, but I wouldn't go so far as to say twitchy.

The steering wheel was replaced because during some body work (I stupidly backed into something at about 5 mph, so that's almost certainly not the cause of the alignment problem) the body shop somehow managed to gash the leather on the steering wheel, so they replaced it. I seriously doubt that they did any more than was necessary to replace the actual wheel I hang onto while driving.

I'm going to take it to the shop anyway (I don't trust myself with this sort of stuff), so I'll just ask him to think about it as he fixes the problem.

Whenever I take a car to the body shop, I take the tail lights and license plates with me when I go, so they can't drive it on the streets. Those guys are animals.

During the late '70s and early '80s I had a friend who was a manager of a body shop that catered to the specialty car dealers here. So, I got to "test" most all the exotic street cars of the time. Great fun that was.

This is how I learned to take the tail lights with me.