Sorry for the long post but thought I would give as many details as possible.
Are any of you guys running Pacer rims on your cars having problems with high speed vibrations because the tire cannot be properly balanced because it's lacking a lip on the outer edge of the rim?
A couple of months ago I mentioned that I have a high speed vibration that starts at 65mph and doesn't seem to go away with any increase in speed. It does seem to drop off a little at 80 mph.
I'm running Michelin Harmonys on Pacer rims on a 1968 Ford Fairlane.
I had the tires rebalanced at two difference tire stores and it made no difference. The only thing that really made a difference was adjusting the wheel bearings.
So thinking if adjusting them helped maybe replacing them would make the vibration go away completely. So I replaced the wheel bearings and had the front drums turned while I was at it. They turned out to be out of round. But this made no difference in the high speed vibration. However the car does brake evenly now that I have adjusted the brakes and does not shimmy when I hit the brakes so that is a plus.
I believe the problem is in the wheel design. Unlike a conventional wheel there is no lip on the outside of the rim and they tell me a clip on weight cannot be installed. I don't see why not but I guess they are in the bizness and know what they are talking about.
See photo:
Another store put the 3oz of stick on weights on the inside of the rim and told me it was balanced but it made no difference.
I asked another tire store if they could put stick on weights on the outer edge of the rims. They said they would fly off and refused to do it. Well I've had clip on weights fly off before so what's the difference?
There must be some liability issue thinking by placing them on the outside of the rim would make them a projectile.
Otherwise I'm the one paying for the balance job. I have a box of stick on weights. I can keep an eye on them and if I see a missing weight I can always stick another one back on in it's place.
Why would the stick-on weighs be anymore prone to fly off whether they were on the inside (photo) or on the outer edge of the wheel?
Apparantly the tire store owner has never tried to remove a stick on weight in his life. Every stick on wheel weight I have ever seen I've had to practically take a chisel to it to get it off the wheel.
Someone asked me if the high speed vibration happened with the factory rims. Well that's a long story. To make a long story short, lets just so I have no idea because the car was a mechanical basket case when I got it. It had four punctured tires so I had it towed to my house on a flatbed, done some repairs and ran some used Michelins on the stock rims. Unfortunately the tire store didn't balance the tires at all plus the torque rod bushings were shot. A week later my new rims and tires arrived. I haven't done business with this tire store in years (bad service) so they haven't touched these new tires.
Before replacing my rims with some that have an outer lip my last ditch effort is to take the factory rims, have them balanced and see what happens.
I have replaced various suspension comonents in the past so there really isn't much more I can replace on this car other than the rims.
One last thing worth mentioning. One Ford guy tried to tell me that these rims are not the correct rims for this model because of the hub size. Because older Fords have smaller hubs than later models. He says the center of the hole in the wheel needs to fit snug around the hub in order to center the wheel. So if the center hole in the wheel is larger than the hub the centering depends on the lug holes.
However the holes in the wheel are tapered and I'm using tapered lug bolts so that should center the wheel. I would think.
I've tried to get used to this high speed vibration but just cant make myself like it.