Ding! ding! ding! We have two winners! The brake drums were the problem all along. Thank you guys for the suggestion. I don't know if I would have thought about that. I do know tha my drive to Salina will be a lot smoother! The HAMB talent and experience is awesome!
This is why balancing off the vehicle is pointless. You can balance the tire and wheel ***embly to within a 1/100th of an ounce but the drums and axles could be out of balance. I don't know why on the vehicle balancing went out of style. Balancing beads or powder will take care of an out of balance drum or rotor too.
Thanks for sharing this fix. I'll p*** this along to a friend who has his 33 Ply. 350/700R-4 in the shop for a vibration at 55 mph. He has done everything else.
On the car balancing went out because of front wheel drive cars and the time it takes. Spinning a front wheel drive front axles puts the cv joints at to great of an angle and may result in a damaged cv joint. If your looking for a on the car balance you might find a truck tire shop that still has a strobe light balancer but that is hard to find in my area. Glad he found the problem.
1. On car was time and labor intensive. The off car machine can do all four before the on car can do one. 2. It takes a skilled, trained tech to do on car. The off car machine does all the thinking. 3. Can't balance a limited slip on the car. jack vines
Glad it worked out Rockable. I can not tell you how frustrated I was with my Monte Carlo. Then again, maybe you can! I went 2 years hunting that vibration. The vibration was enough to visibly see the p***enger seat shaking. GM did....well...much of nothing for me. Many complaints until GM set me up with a tech that did nothing but trouble shoot chronic issues. We worked together on it for about 2 hours. Pulled the wheels only to find a drum without any balancing weights welded on. Installed a new one and that solved the issue. For me, it was not so much vibration but the reluctance of the service managers and GM to not look at me like my head was screwed on backwards. This was the last GM I owned(1988 model year) until my purchase of the 54 Buick. My family was staunch GM supporters up to that time. At any rate, glad your magic carpet ride is now really magic!
It is quite possible that the balancing on the vehicle went out of style because balancing drums and rotors was now performed at the factory. However, it is better IMO to balance the entire unit(tire/rim/drum/rotor) while on the axle. I think by and large unbalanced drums and rotors are few and far between. However, still a issue as we see here in this thread.
I had been trying to solve this for over a year. So, I know how frustrating it is. I had to stop by the driveshaft shop and tell them what I found because I knew they thought that I thought they were full of it.
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