Help! Handling problem with the A

I have a question. On all you tie rod ends are they all tapered or do any of them have or use the 5/8 through bolts? I was over at a friends house and was looking at his car and he used on one of his connections a tapered rod end where it should have been a 5/8 through bolt, and was having the same problem. Just a thought...John

 

Any news on the vibration Toner?

 

Howdy folks, Been a busy few weeks with family stuff. Update on the wobble. It is a little better, but not gone yet.

Since I left off in the post we have:

rebalanced the driveshaft - no change

swapped to different front rotors - a little better

changed the axle angle again from 9º to 6º - no change

changed to 1/8 toed out - a little better.

The last changes were the friday before the long weekend. I had a bunch of family stuff going on that weekend so no work on the car at all. The vibration used to happen @ 54 MPH exactly & taper off at about 64. thought it was strange that you could roll at 53 all day long smooth as ****er but hit 54 & the **** hit the fan. We have been using a GPS for a speedo so that is how I have been getting the speeds that the shake stops/starts.
Now with the latest changes it comes on at about 56 & levels out again at 62. Only a couple of MPH difference in speed but at least we finally had something change it slightly, and we know we are on the right track now. Also it is not nearly as violent now.
We are going to keep working on it, I had a friend suggest changing the wheel bearings in the rotors - figured if the rotors were out of balance enough to shake that badly, it might have fubar'd the bearings too. Sounded like a good idea so we are gonna try it.

We have had the wheels off of this car enough times in the last 3 months that we could give a NASCAR pit crew a run for their money. The worst thing about this whole process is the fact that my Tudor is being cannibalized for the parts we are changing out. Now instead of looking like a hot rod, mine is a wheel-less derelict sitting in the corner of the garage. Hopefully it will be a rolling ch***is again soon.

I will keep you guys updated on any further progress. Thanks to all for the ideas & suggestions.

 

Ok, been a while since I updated this thread.

Since the last time we have rebalanced the front wheels twice with no real improvement. Still looked like one of the wheels was out of balance. We had them spun with an on the car balancer as well and they were OK until just below 60 MPH then things went sideways into the wall in a hurry. Both fronts were bad but one was way worse than the other. the guy that checked them said that there would be a pound or so of weights to balance out the bad one. Not what we considered an ideal solution.

When they were on a regular balancer you could see the wheel spinning & it looked like it was out of round - the tread would oscillate up & down almost 1/4 inch on the bad one & half that on the "good" one. Watching the rim it seemed to run true, it was the tire causing the issue. I have read about a bunch of people that have had luck with having tires shaved to eliminate vibration. I have done this on our stock car but I was unwilling to do this to a new pair of tires that cost me almost $400 each. Plus, IMO the one tire would be almost bald on one side after being shaved with new tread on the other.

We figured that we had nothing to lose so we contacted the place I bought the tires, Queensway Tire in Simcoe, Ontario. They told us to bring the tires down for them to have a look at & they would replace them. We took the tires to them (2 hrs each way for us) and they looked them over. They had 2 new tires sitting there ready to go. In the ensuing conversation the guy behind the counter thought we were buying the two new tires. We informed him that no, we were after the replacement of 2 defective tires. they looked the tires over again more carefully including giving them a spin on the balancer to see how they acted. after seeing that they were not spinning true they then spun both tires 180º on the rims & rebalanced them. Minor improvement but still had the death wobble.

We asked about replacement since we had ruled out pretty much everything but the tires. The guy helping us took down the #'s off of the tires measured the tread depth (less than 2000 miles on these tires at this point) and told us he would have to contact Coker. This was a Saturday. He told us he would contact Coker on Monday & get back to us with their answer. After waiting a week and a half, we called him. He stated that he had called Coker & they had not gotten back to him yet. Told us he would contact them again & get back to us. He called the next day & told us to bring them back down & they would replace them for the cost of the mount & balance.

Now, I must state that when we started building the car the tires were one of the early purchases. When I went & got the receipt for the tires from when I originally bought them it was dated May 2000. So even though there were very few miles on the tires they were 10 years old. Coker could very well have told me to kick rocks since the tires were 10 years old.

So, big props to Coker for standing behind their product even after ten years. I have read a lot of threads & posts bashing Coker but IMO they are one of the good guys out there. Not everybody gets it right the first time, hell I don't get it right the first time most of the time when I do things but also not everybody will make it right in the end. Coker did that for us.

And the end of the story?

We took the wheels home with the new tires on them & bolted them to the car & then went for a drive. We were kind of holding our breath waiting for it to shake at the expected speed the same as it had with every other change we had made thus far. As we hit the target speed.....

Nothing! No shake. No rattle. No wobble. No odd behavior of any type. It continued to roll as smooth as ****er. We went up & down through the bad spot several times kind of half expecting bad **** to happen again but still smooth. The coupe is much nicer to drive now and we have commenced to driving the wheels off of the thing.

Just thought all of the folks that had followed this thread & made suggestions would like to know how one of these "death wobble" threads finally worked itself out. Thanks to everyone that offered up idea's & possible solutions to the problem.

And again, a big thanks to the folks at Coker for stepping up & doing the right thing.

 

Thats great you got it figured out, I only wish I had seen this post a while back. I used to work in a shop , had to replace a lot of tires, many of then that would balance ok but were out of round, We had a Hunter tire balancer with a road force tester on it, it would find them problem tires easy, sometimes we could break the bead down and rotate the tire on the rim but other times we had to chuck the tire. It would also check the rim for balance and roundness.

 

I was fairly sure that the rims were OK, they were brand new wheel vintiques rims. They were smooth & straight when we were balancing the tires, just the tires were oscillating. Turning them 180º had no real effect on the problem. we tried everything we could think of and a lot of the stuff that was suggested in this thread.

 

WE even had brand new Goodyears that would not p*** the road force test, had a heck of a time trying to get the parts dept to take em back, the Goodyears were replacements for the Firestone recall , I think the quality control went way down at Goodyear when they had such a high Demand because of Firestone's recall

 

I would have guessed the wheels since I just threw a pair of powder coated Wheel Vintique smoothies in the s**** pile. I had the same problem til I tried a 15 yr old 10 hole wheels and the shake went away. The older centers are heavily ribbed and don't distort when tightened like the newer centers.