nytoy

replaced it when I did the control arms 1000 miles ago

nytoy

Can you get hubcentric rings for the STOCK 16s?? I wouldn't think you would need to.

piratesoul

When the Lug Nuts are over torqued you can warp the rotor which will give you a vibration. This is why you should use a torque wrench or torq-stix.

Even though the assemblies have been road force balanced, that doesn't mean that it fixed the problem. If you sitll have 25lbs or more of road force in an assembley you will get a vibration. They should have given you a print out with this informtion. If you do have over 25lbs of Road Force in any wheel & tire assembley they should take that tire off that wheel and see if they can match mount it to one of you other wheels.

nytoy

i will try re-torqueing the lug nuts, its supposed to be what 70?

GSteg

iTrader: (15)

76ftlbs.

Torquing the lug nuts is definitely a good idea. One time my lugs almost fell out because they weren't on tight enough. There was a hell of a vibration going on in the front.

DJ TANTRA

I was having a lot of vibration around 58mph -- Turned out I had warped rotors...When I changed the front rotors it did the trick!!!

nytoy

Ok the dealership looked at it again today and found it was the new Dunlop Wintersport 3D tires were out of round on the roadforce balancer. TireRack is warrenting them and sending me 2 new tires for free! And covering $40 for mounting and re-balencing, how amazing customer service is that!

The dealership did put the ones they couldn't get to balance good on the back and most of the vibration went away, but you could still feel it. So hopefully once I get the new tires it will be smooth as silk again.

e-man

Interesting. I've been having problems balancing the Dunlop Winter Sport 3Ds as well. They now have been balanced a total of 4 times (3 times at NTB and once at a new shop), and they still aren't right. Tire Rack sent me two new tires after the 3rd try, but on the 4th try (Road Force balancing), the new shop told me that they did not think anything was wrong with the tires. They told me to hang on to the new tires for a few days just in case, but Tire Rack sent UPS to my house to pick up the tires the next day and my wife didn't know that I wanted to hang on to them.

Just curious, what road force was required to balance your tires? Were any close to 25? I had 2 that took 21 pounds, and although it's below the rejection level (25 lbs), my personal opinion is that it was two close and there might be a problem with them.

FrankWhite

My guy got the Road force machine to get all 4 wheels close to zero lbs. Only thing that worked and I had horrible vibrations. Get him to road force them to zero or as close as possible and you're golden.

e-man

Thanks, Frank. Can you explain to me what this lbs thing means? The tech said that two of the wheels took 21 pounds of force, one took 16, and one took 6. He said that all 4 wheels were balanced. What determines how much force needs to be applied? Also, how can you reduce that number without dismounting the tire from the wheel? Is that the answer? Rotate the tire on the wheel to require less force to road force balance the tires? I'm a little confused about this whole road force balancing thing. Thanks.

e

FrankWhite

I'm not a mechanic by any means...I told my guy to get them as low as he could and he got 3 at zero and 1 almost to zero. My vibrations disappeared. ChuckB may be able to explain. He put me on to what the lbs meant in wheel balancing but it kind of goes over my head. Good luck pal.

e-man

Thanks, Frank. Who is this ChuckB guy that everyone is always talking about? I guess we'll have to wait for him to chime in.

e

justfixit

Tires when rolling act like they are made of springs. A vibration can occur when one or more of these "springs" has a different spring rate. Road force balancing will minimize this vibration by matching the stiffest portion of the tire with the lowest portion of the wheel. Wheel runout has to be measured also. To completely Road Force balance a tire and wheel, the tire will have to be spun on the wheel to align these two points. Most balancers give an initial reading of the amount of Road Force the tire is applying in lbs.

e-man

So, if I understand you correctly, the less road force caused by the tire/rim, the better. When I took the tires/rims to get them road force balanced, the tires were already mounted on the rims. The tires were applying 6, 16, 21 and 21 pounds, respectively. In order to achieve the full benefit of road force balancing, it sounds to me like the tech should have rotated the tires that were reading 21 pounds (and maybe the 16 pound one) in order to minimize that number to something much lower.

Let me ask you this. If you have two tires that cause 5 and 20 pounds of road force, respectively, and both are perfectly balanced, will both perform exactly the same, or will the one that applies 20 pounds of road force potentially cause more vibration?

piratesoul

The one that has 20 lbs of road force will be more prone to causing vibration. As justfixit points out (nice copy & paste from the Hunter web site by the way) the tire acts as a spring, actually like ten springs around the wheel. What causes the vibration is that one of these "springs" is stiffer than the others. This is because of a hard or stiff spot in the tire. What a road force balancer does is locate the stiff spot in the tire and also find the run out (low spot) in the wheel. The technician then matches the stiff spot int he tire and low spot in the wheel by spinning the wheel with in the tire thus reducing the amount of road force in the assembly. It is almost impossible to get 0 lbs of road force in an assembly. In order to do this the wheel and tire would have to be absolutely perfectly round, and this just doesn't happen. If you can get it down to 10 lbs or less you shouldn't feel any vibrations. I have been selling these machines for 9 years and they can do wonders for drivability issues. They now even have a feature to measure Lateral Force which will correct a radial pull. Radial pulls cant be corrected by alignments, but a Road Force machine with Straight Trak will correct this problem and eliminate pulls alignments can't fix.