Back in the 60’s and 70’s it seemed like all the small auto service shops had this Bear logo on a sign. I can recall seeing it in many towns and in different states.
It seems to be advertising wheel alignments. Was it the brand name of the front end alignment equipment? Or was it a franchise chain of auto service shops? From what I remember these were small independently owned auto service shops.
I’ve wondered about this for years. The Bear signs seemed to disappear sometime in the 1970’s. Whats the story behind this bear?
heres three vintage examples
I would also suspect that Bear started to lose market share to Hunter during that time period. My impression was that Hunter alignment machines were superior in design, but they didn’t have cool signs to put up.
The bear balancers were capable of very precise balancing. The owner of the shop I went to would stick a folded piece of paper in the tread. If that didn’t move the tire hey would rebalance it. You could get tires balanced at high speeds and he’d check it at different speeds to see if anything changed.
I suppose a modern computer driven balancer is capable of doing as good a job but I haven’t been to a shop willing to spend any time on it.
Yes, the Grateful Dead bears are grateful ripoffs of the wheel alignment Bears. Apparently, there is no effort to defend the old trademark. There’s an article somewhere about it.
