Originally Posted by BlueRaleigh

So I was riding with a friend the other day and I was commenting about how the bike always pulled to the right. We initially thought it might be the rear brake cable tugging on the handle bars. We stopped and inspected the bike and found that the front tire was actually sitting slightly off center to the frame. It turned out that the fork was bent to the side. So we removed the wheel and leveraged the fork and cold set it as best we could. For eyeballing, we got it pretty damn straight...straight enough I could ride without my hands on the handlebars (which was impossible to do before). But still, this seemed like a sloppy repair method. Is there a better way to straighten a fork so that it is 100% accurate?

I also recently used Sheldon Brown's string method to widen the spread between the dropouts to accommodate a wider wheel. The alignment seems very good, but I'm curious if there's a better way. Are there machines that can do this stuff with precision accuracy, and if so, where can I find them? Thanks.