porta
Member
- Joined
- August 16, 2012
- Messages
- 13
- Reaction score
- 0
- Year, Model & Trim Level
- 2001 Ford Explorer Sport
So I'm hoping someone out there might be able to shed some light on my problem.
My 2001 Explorer Sport 4WD began vibrating at highway speed back in July. This sort of came out of nowhere as far as I can tell. I looked at my tires and noticed an awful cross tire wear pattern on the front tires, almost as though the wheels were being dragged sideways. I took it into an alignment shop and sure enough he alignment was horribly off (it always pulled way right, but never shook or vibrated so I lazily ignored it).
Anyways - alignment shop would not realign anything as I had to first replace a bad passenger lower ball joint and inner tie rod, and bad driver side upper ball joint and control arm. I successfully replaced all of these items and then had car aligned properly and put two new tires on it to replace the badly worn tires (the rear tire treads look to be fine so they were not replaced).
The front end vibration is now worse than ever. It is a constant speed sensitive vibration, present at all speeds (speeds up and slows down with the vehicle speed, but always there even at 15 mph). It can be felt in the floorboards, but not really in the wheel or seat even. It sounds cyclical in nature, as though it is wheel related. At high speed, sounds like someone is banging a drum almost - whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. I have not noticed any change in sound or vibration intensity when turning.
Some other things I know are wrong with the vehicle:
- shocks are garbage. the vehicle bounces all over the place when hitting a bump at speed
- vehicle sags in the front right, a few inches lower than front left - this is a bad spring right? Could that be causing vibration?
- 4 wheel low does not engage properly, so I never use it - only mention in case there could be a drivetrain related issue?
Before I go down the expensive path of swapping out everything from rotors to wheel hubs, I thought I'd check on here to see if anyone has any ideas?
Thanks in advance
porta
My 2001 Explorer Sport 4WD began vibrating at highway speed back in July. This sort of came out of nowhere as far as I can tell. I looked at my tires and noticed an awful cross tire wear pattern on the front tires, almost as though the wheels were being dragged sideways. I took it into an alignment shop and sure enough he alignment was horribly off (it always pulled way right, but never shook or vibrated so I lazily ignored it).
Anyways - alignment shop would not realign anything as I had to first replace a bad passenger lower ball joint and inner tie rod, and bad driver side upper ball joint and control arm. I successfully replaced all of these items and then had car aligned properly and put two new tires on it to replace the badly worn tires (the rear tire treads look to be fine so they were not replaced).
The front end vibration is now worse than ever. It is a constant speed sensitive vibration, present at all speeds (speeds up and slows down with the vehicle speed, but always there even at 15 mph). It can be felt in the floorboards, but not really in the wheel or seat even. It sounds cyclical in nature, as though it is wheel related. At high speed, sounds like someone is banging a drum almost - whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. I have not noticed any change in sound or vibration intensity when turning.
Some other things I know are wrong with the vehicle:
- shocks are garbage. the vehicle bounces all over the place when hitting a bump at speed
- vehicle sags in the front right, a few inches lower than front left - this is a bad spring right? Could that be causing vibration?
- 4 wheel low does not engage properly, so I never use it - only mention in case there could be a drivetrain related issue?
Before I go down the expensive path of swapping out everything from rotors to wheel hubs, I thought I'd check on here to see if anyone has any ideas?
Thanks in advance
porta
