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Hello
I replaced my front and rear brake pads,rotors and rear brake calipers. I have cleaned everything with wire brush and brake cleaner (as I always do) before I put everything back together. Now when I drive over 60 MPH my steering wheel starts to vibrate a lot. Feels like I have a bump in one of the tires. I know this is probably a tire balance issue , but why nothing like that happened before I work on the brakes? Also when I was working on them I notice my front shocks are leaking. Can this be a cause of the vibration?
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All the rust crust you cleaned off makes the rotor and rim sit flatter against the rotor and hub than before, changing your effective mounted wheel balance.
Okay. But wheel balance is adjusted on the wheel balancing machine. It got nothing to do with how it sits in the car.
If there is crust on the backside of rim, on the hub face, and you put it on the balancer, whatever crookedness is caused by the uneven surface is factored into the balance. When balancing you spin the wheel a first time to get your readings of where to put weight. Then add the weights and spin it again to get all zeros, meaning it’s balanced.
If you remove that wheel with all zeros and put it right back on the machine and spin it, it will NOT be all zeros again unless the backside of the rim is perfectly flat and clean (virtually never the case). Hence in the same way, if you change anything about the surfaces of your hubs, rotors, or wheels, your balance characteristics change. Just because you can’t it by eye doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
Also, I will say that as a tech, I’ve only once been able to ever get a service writer to even try to sell time to clean these surfaces to produce a perfect balance. Most customers have never heard of this or thought of it and therefore think it’s a scam to try and sell them the work.
Along this line of thought, I used to own a DSM. The OEM rotors on this car would get excessively rusty, If you mounted a wheel without cleaning both rotor and wheel surface and then torqued the lug nuts to spec, a week later you would have loose wheels after the rust fell out.
OP, as usual, I have a stupid question. WHICH WAY does it shake? Is it up down or side to side? Also, when you experiencing this, does your booty shake? As in – is it the frame, or in steering wheel only?
My wild guess is, if it’s side to side wobble, you do not have lug nuts evenly torqued, or a rim is not sitting flush on the hub. So the wheel sort of goes in figure of 8 pattern, causing that.
Out of round tires usually show themselves at parking lot speeds. Boat on waves. But it’s entire car.
What could have easily happened is you simply lost one of the balancing weights during all those manipulations. Easy happen, right? That’s why I tell them to use sticky weights only. They do NOT come loose.It shakes side to side. Only steering wheel shakes. I’m going to check the wheels again right now. Weird thing is I was driving from work. One time when I was going 70 MPH the steering wheel was stable , no wobble. Then I catch traffic and after few minutes accelerate to 70 MPH again and this time it was shaking. I assume something is loose by the driver wheel. When I was backing up and turn my wheels almost 90 degrees I can hear some knocking noise.
Will update in a while. Going to garage right nowInspected everything. Nothing loose. Paid extra attention while tighten the wheels. Will see tomorrow once I get on highway in the morning.
I was mounting/balancing snow tires on my 200k Honda today and had a chance to take pics of the wheels after I cleaned them up enough to get a perfect balance out of them. This is what you would need to provide to a shop for balancing if you want to leave nothing to chance. Wheels being balanced will not normally be cleaned up to this degree in a professional environment. Just figured I’d take a couple minutes to post this since it seems relevant to this discussion.
A vibration that comes and goes, felt through the steering wheel, is often two front wheels out of balance. When the heavy points are aligned the vibration is gone but when out of phase the vibration returns.
I’ve encountered the situation where my tires were exactly the same diameter and when the road was straight I found I could drive as many as twenty miles before the vibration returned.
OP, steering wheel can not shake side to side. It can rotate, or wobble in circular motion, side to side. If that’s the case, it’s either ill mounted wheels, a figure of 8 tracking I mentioned before, or something is not right with rack n pinion, or tie rod ends are no good.
How did you check on tie rod ends?
As of the pics posted. Nicely done, man.What I did with tie rods is I lifted the car, put a jack stand under the knuckle and lower the car enough so I was still able to spin the wheel. Then I shake the wheel little bit and check for looseness.
I noticed again that when I came back from lunch and was backing up my car. Front driver wheel was making weird noise like something was loose in it. It only happens when I back up and turn the wheels almost 90 degrees.
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