Steering Wheel Vibration after a Lift and Alignment

[rjmckay99]

I’ve had the issue on and off since my first change to a heavier off road tire a few years ago. Different brands of tire (Cooper ST Maxx, Goodyear Duratrac), all on factory trail wheels. It was always good when it leaves the shop but creeps in over time as the tire wears.

Now, new wheels and tires and a road force balance and it seems good. The plan now is to be more vigilant with tire rotation and getting it in at the first sign of vibration to avoid uneven wear.

I think the core issue is the 4runner is just sensitive to slight imbalance in tires as they wear and a lot of tire shops don’t quite get the balance right in the first place. Road force takes some of the guessing out of things so I believe that’s why people have better luck with it.

 

[meltdown]

For a temporary fix, try rotating your tires. I had the vibration but wanted to wait on replacing my nearly worn tires before I took it to a shop. Rotated my tires and the vibration got better. Also noticed some uneven wear on my driver’s front tire. Still haven’t gotten new tires. These Falkens have been wearing like iron the last 3000 miles.

 

[BlackWorksInc]

I could never get my tires to balance correctly when I had them in my ko2's, Also the balance was always a little off, depending if the vehicle sat to long, or i would get a weird shimmy for the first few miles, then it would go away, then come back. The balance was never horrible, but it was never fixed either. It was enough to be an annoyance.

One day, I Forgot to tell the tire shop that I had beads in the tires, so when they went to move my tires on to new rims, resulted in a mess on the shop floor....oops my bad.

Went back to standard lead weights on my new rims w/ old tires, and no more balancing issues. Not sure if the balancing issues were due to the tires being hard to balance, or the stupid beads, or changing rims, or a combination of all of the above.

I have only ever dealt with a few balance bead tires (my own included), but never had the opportunity to break them down (customer didn't like the labor cost for us to clean out the tires and re-balance, not that I blame them). I have noticed those odd imbalance quirks; particularly getting on a curved on-ramp; it takes a bit for the beads to move from being flung on the sidewall.

Yeah, I'm leaning closer and closer to just dismounting the tires and doing a proper road force balance one of these weekends I guess.

Thanks for the response!