Well I won't let these guys work on my truck again...
I bought new tires from this shop in November and paid a little over a grand. This came with an alignment but their machine was broken. I was given a voucher as the alignment machine was going to be fixed by Thanksgiving week. They ended up not getting the machine working until January so I got the alignment about a month ago. This was an inconvenience but not my issue.
Today I noticed my truck was pulling to the right on the freeway so I stopped to make sure my tie rods hadn't loosened up. I found that during the alignment the shop had taken a torch to the inner to outer tie rod connection without removing the inner tie rod boot. The boot is torched so I will need to rip everything apart to replace this boot before I wreck my steering rack seals. This will cause me to loose my front end alignment so the shop effectively accomplished nothing. Who knows, maybe they cooked the grease in my outer tie rod (replaced in December) so that may need to be changed as well.
After finding this I checked my tire air pressure because I was still looking for the reason the truck was pulling to the right. The air pressure on every tire was over 50 pounds. I thought that couldn't be right so I stopped at a gas station and bought a new tire gauge but this showed the same thing. This is a 1st gen single cab Tacoma and the door sticker recommends 26 front and 29 in the rear. I deflated my tires and found they were well over 50 pounds as it took a while to get inside the bounds of the gauge.
So in short I'm glad I found the bad inner tie rod boot before my steering column got wrecked, and I'm glad I checked my air pressure before the first sunny day when my tires go pop. The bottom line though is that I shouldn't have to be doing this stuff. That's what I paid these guys to do.
EDIT:
In response to the tire pressure comment by the owner:
Load determines recommended tire pressure, not load range. You can't inflate the tires for max loading and expect they get better tread wear on a 3000 pound vehicle. The weight of the vehicle stays the same so the tire pressure should stay in the same ballpark as what the door tag calls for. Your optimum tire pressure will vary a bit due to the tire construction (i.e. stiffer sidewall, narrower width than stock) but only a chalk test will tell you at what pressure your tread is wearing evenly.