Have your wheels started or vibrating while driving at higher speeds recently? If it’s not snow stuck in your wheels, it could be an out of balance tire. This article will show you case about wheel of Ford out of balance and how to adjust it. For more cases about Ford, please refer to Ford Trouble Repair.
You have a vibration while you’re driving on the highway, for some reason,everyone thinks they need an alignment. Now an alignment has nothing to do with vibration. The purpose of the alignment is to make sure the tires are going down the road straight, making good contact with the ground. So that you don’t wear the tires out prematurely. The reason why you would have an alignment done is if you just had tire replaced or you placed any front end components or your steering wheel was off center. This is going to prolong the life of your tires.
What we want to do is take a look at the tires, see there’s anything obvious , any abnormal wear in the tires, if it looks like it’s extremely choppy. See if there’s any wheel weights Outside of the tire
Sometimes wheel weights fall off. It’s unlikely but it does happen.
You need to go around the car and grab every tire and just give it a shake to make sure none of the suspension or steering components are loose. If you have something like a bad inner or outer rod that’s excessive that could cause a vibration.
Most for the time the reason why your vehicle vibrates is the tire balance is off. So we will take these wheels off and bring it over to the tire balancer.
When they build the tire there is going to be some slight imperfections in the rubber. There could be a little bit more rubber on one side than other side. Or the steel belts on the tire could be shifted slightly and that’s going to cause the tire to not be exactly perfect.
And the rim itself could also have some imperfections. It’s just slightly heavier on one side than the other because of that we’re going to have to balance the tire.You have to put weights on the tire either on the outside or on the back side. Or there is also sticky weights that can go on the inside of the rim itself.
Because we’re trying to diagnose why we have a vibration, we’re going to leave these wheel weights on and put on a machine like below to check the balance.
If the balance checks out we know it probably wasn’t the tires that were causing the vibration. But if it’s off then those wheel weights are either in the wrong spot or they just need to be rebalanced.
Check tire balance procedure:
Check your tire pressure and adjust accordingly.
Set up the machine, put in all the measurements.
Spin it up
These are reading that we got from the tire.
This is 2.75 ounces on the outside of the tire, inner side is only 0.75 ounces.
This is definitely going to give us a tire vibration. Anything above 0.25 could potentially give you a tire vibration.
Take the wheel weight off, re-spin the tire see what we end up with and see if we can fix this vibration.
After spinning it again with no weights on it, we get data below
We’re going to take a weight that’s 0.75 ounces for the outer side and also a half ounce for the inner side.
We need to turn the wheel so the machine will tell us where to put the weight.
After put on the weight on both side, the figures are exactly what we need.
So we balance that up we shouldn’t have any more vibration out of this tire. Do the same step for the other three tires.
Anyway you may have a bent rim or an outer round tire that may not show up on the balancer results. Take a look at the tire and rim while it’s on the machine spinning and if it looks bent that could potentially give you a vibration as well,even though the tire balances out.
For more information, please refer to Auto Knowledge.