Advanced wheel alignment advice

Did you rule out the possibility of a bent wheel and/or warped rotor?

Old Wolf wrote:

Your symptoms could describe tires that are incorrectly mounted.

Have the shop put the car on a hoist, raise it a couple of feet, then spin the tires. Do they wobble and waggle? Then there's your problem.

When you accelerate at very low speed, is there also a wobble in the steering wheel?

That does not follow. You should have taken it in for tire inspection and balance.

If they didn't understand the basics that high speed wobble is a balance problem they are a lost cause. Take it somewhere else. Why take your car somewhere where you have to attempt to teach them how to service your car based on internet-derived advice?

Tire balance and/or bent wheel. Occasionally a tire has a "squirelly" belt. Front tires will make the steering wheel oscillate, rear tires will make the whole car vibrate.

Stability is frequently incorrect tire pressures. If the tire sizes are stock go with the vehicle manufacturer's recommendations per the sticker on the doorjamb or wherever. Do NOT let anybody second guess this. They do NOT know more than the chassis/suspension engineers employed by the vehicle manufacturer. What's printed on the side of the tire is a MAXIMUM not a recommendation. We fix 75%+ of our customers' handling complaints by settings tires to the correct pressures.

Camber is a very non-critical setting.

Could cause a slight pull but unlikely to be a problem at all. What is the spec?

Toe is critical and MUST be set to spec.

Toe should be set to manufacturer's specs to minimize tire wear and steering wander. Any attempt to experiment with toe settings other than spec to reduce wobble will merely destroy tires and not address the actual problem.

That makes no sense. Toe is a measurement involving BOTH wheels. It is the difference between the wheels at the front versus the rear. Talking about one wheel toed in and the other wheel toed out merely means that the steering wheel is has been turned to one side.

NO, NO and NO! Look at the tires and wheels. In relatively rare cases a bad inner CV joint will cause front wheel wobble under acceleration. Anything loose in the steering linkage can exaggerate the problem but more so at low speeds.

Don

What you describe is not an alignment problem. Sounds more like a bent wheel or tire out of round/balance. BTW, all parameters are adjustable, including caster. It just takes more work than a quickie alignment shop will put in.

Every time a vehicle acts like that on me, it is a balance issue or a bubble or warp in the tire tread or a bent rim.

The area between 60 and 90 is when the tire goes from compressed by vehicle weight to pushed out from centripetal force so they float a little there. That is where a bad balance usually shows first.

Mike

86/00 CJ7 Laredo, 33x9.5 BFG Muds, 'glass nose to tail >

If it was fine before and now it wobbles, look to things that got changed. Onward to what might cause it...

I've had two of those on my cars over the years. In one case the manager was emphatic that it was a bent rim. You will be shocked -- shocked! -- to hear that the shop was responsible for the warranty fulfillment on the tire but had nothing to do with the rims. When taken to a more on-the-ball outlet of the same chain, it turned out to be a separation that smiled at you quite visibly when the tire was dismounted and you looked at the inside while the tech flexed it around. Interestingly, it didn't cause much of a pull, though the other one did.

One of the first clues in these cases, sometimes, is seen on the balancing machine. An alert tech who finds that the machine wants him to apply an extraordinary number of wheel weights, especially if they seem to be needed in different places every time he spins it up and/or every time the increasingly disgruntled customer drags it back, should look at these matters.

Some forms of anomalous wear, such as cupping, will prevent you from

*keeping* a tire balanced very long, but I think (could be wrong) that that shouldn't prevent a satisfactory balance from being achieved and kept in the short term.

Finally, don't forget one that I've encountered several times -- a wheelweight that whirled off. Whee! You see a lot of them lying in the gutter, each, I would assume, formerly owned by a car that now has a mysterious vibration. Some shops put them on properly and discard ones whose tab is loose. Others just slap things on and send you on your way.

Of course, another old trick to narrow down a problem is to do a tire rotation and see if the problem changes in character or circumstances.

Cheers,

--Joe

Thanks to everyone who replied. I did in fact have a wheel balance (with tyres on and off) at the same time.

I went back to the shop today (without my car) and they said that the wobble was a balance issue and they suggested I get some locator rings for the wheels.

I'll jack the car up and spin them and see if I can observe any wobble, it'd be good to confirm that, until I can actually get hold of some rings.

Someone mentioned a warped rotor; one of my left brakes has been squealing for a long time now and two different workshops I went to both couldn't fix it. The pads are good and the calipers are not jammed (they were, but I fixed them), so maybe a warped rotor is causing both problems.

Specifically, at lower speeds and light braking the squeal will not be continuous (it's clearly squealing for about 270 degrees of the wheel's rotation and not squealing for the other 90 degrees of it).

I tried new (second-hand and machined, in fact) front rotors, no difference. I wanted to have the back rotors machined but the shop said they were too thin to machine. I suppose new back rotors would be the next thing to try there.

Also don't forget play in wheel bearings. That will exacerbate any tendency to wobble. I had an old nail many years ago that wobbled gently at about 55 mph and no amount of wheel balancing would cure it. Turned out to be a loose wheel bearing on one side which just needed readjusting. Play in other suspension components can have the same effect.

-- Dave Baker

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I think warped rotors cause pulsating when braking (at any speed -- if you are sensitive to what your car is saying to you, you can feel even mild rotor pulsation with your braking foot) and squeal comes from dirty brake pads and/or improper/inadequate lubrication of their backsides.

I'm also thinking that although a warped rotor can cause an imbalance, that relatively small thing near the center has smaller effects than the big heavy thing 'way out at the end of the radius -- there's a square law in there (not to mention a potentially square tire on there).

The pursuit of smoothness can lead you to an on-car spin balance that accounts for the rotor as well, but I wouldn't start with that -- especially if (a) you have no pulsation when braking and (b) an alignment (with balancing and rotation and maybe tire re-mounting -- what all did they do?) seems to have caused the present complaint.

As for rear rotors, see if a tire rotation changes the nature of the problem, i.e., does the vibration stay on the same corner of the car or move with the tire? Aside from being a useful data point, rotation is a near no-tech diagnostic that you can perform in your own driveway with the tools and skills needed to change a tire. (But since you're engaged with a tire and/or alignment shop in solving this problem, let them do it -- in fact, I'm surprised they haven't already.)

Cheers,

--Joe