vibration from front at 65 mph+

[becker69]

Just wondered if anyone could give me some advice on how to tell if a vibration (wobble?) is due to tires out of ballance or need for an alignment? I am due for an alignment already, my truck vears slighlty to the right, and the inside of my driver's tire is showing some wearing. The vibration gets more violent at 60+ mph. If I look at the passenger seat while driving at 70 or so, it looks like someone is shaking it! I drove to vegas this weekend and it was tollerable but I did not drive over 70 for very long. But I am driving to L.A. this weekend with my family in the car, and I don't want to make my wife sick from all of the jittering. SO any help that any of you can offer on the felt differences between imballance and alignment? Thanks.

 

[jasonb]

i also have this start just recently. after searching the forum for the topic i learned a few things...

1. it seems to be a fairly common thing in the explorer.

2. try all the normal stuff (balance, rotate, alignment)

3. new shocks helped a few people.

4. a few people had bad u-joints or out of balance drive shafts that seemed to cause this. getting the shaft balanced and the u-joints replaced seemed to solve it for these folks.

5. one had something with her differential, but that's all i could tell. it was still under warranty.

now mine just started a couple of weeks ago. i have since gotten an alignment, rotated my tires (long overdue) and balanced them all too. one wheel is out of balance and i think it's the wheel, not the tire. i suspect this may be part of my problem but the shocks are stock too and probably need replacing. my next thing is to replace the wheel and tire that are bad and use them as a spare.

oh one more thing for anyone that wants to chime in.. one of my tires (the one on the bad wheel) has a pretty large cut in the sidewall, really in the tread. i can peel it back quite far. think this may be causing the out of balance on that wheel?

 

[becker69]

Jason, Thanks for the info... today I had it 'thrust aligned' all wheels (but one) rotated and ballanced. The one that I didn't get ballanced; they said all there calibrations said to place a 6.5 oz weight, which is extremely high... they didn't have a tire machine, but advized me to take it to a tire place and have it re-mounted w/ about a 180 degree on the tire... and then have it ballanced. There theory was that it was the specific placement on the rim, w/ that specific wheel. All of your points are the ones that I made my decisions on as well. Now, my truck seems to veer less, although it is still there. When I inquired on playing around w/ adj. of the torsions they said it may help one side, yet hurt the other slightly. I had a "Cam-Kit" installed that is supposed to allow adjustable allignments from this point on. They showed me the kit in a book that specified for 98+ explorers, etc. This was after they tried to allign it, and my drivers side was off of specs (they printed me copied of the read-out but it is outside). Well, I will know tommorow if they fixed it. I am driving to L.A. and I only took it up to 55 mph today. Thanks for the input. I will see if I can post from CA on the results.

 

[rearviewsg]

i have that problem with my explorer i was told my my local tire store that upgradign to a higher ply tire causes most of the problem they said explorers are the most sensative car on the road to tires and alignment.