Yup. Thats it. The dealers don't know how to fix this. Almost nothing works. Some trucks have it, some don't. Mine does and its about twice as bad as the one in the video. I have given up on i .

 

My pro comp kit is going on this weekend. I wonder if this is going to get worse with the 6 inch lift.

 

An imbalance of 10 grams or greater can be felt in the steering on these trucks. Road force variation of over 20 lbs or so can be felt in the steering.

It takes a lot of time and someone who really cares to balance and mount wheels (even OEM wheels need to go on the hubs a specific way for best effect) on these trucks to minimize or eliminate steering wheel vibration or nibble.

I've literally spent a whole day balancing, indexing, checking clearances around the hub with a feeler gauge, measuring hub and wheel runout, etc. to get one truck right. The real kick in the *** is that once it's right, next time the tires have to come off for a rotation or brakes or whatever, all that work is thrown out the window.

 

Trade in time for a different brand?

 

Can you explain a little more about this, specifically how do you know what way is the best way to mount OEM wheels?

 

Had to replace my front rotors and pads on my 04 Lariat....warped rotors, cheap Ford pads replaced them....no more nibble!

 

While balancing may help the symptoms somewhat, the problem never really goes away. As soon as you hit a large pot hole, or the tires wear enough for the balance to shift slightly, the nibble is back. I had my tires road force balanced and the nibble went away for a week. It's a joke. No truck or car should be that sensitive to the tires. I have driven both cars and trucks that I never had 80K+ miles with unbalanced tires and I never felt a thing.

 

It's a side effect of Ford building an F150 with a frame that's like two or three times (or however many) more torsionally rigid than the previous gen trucks. The frame acts as a big tuning fork, amplifying vibrations and road feel that would be ambient in a "lesser" design.

 

A road force balancer will show the tires with the lowest road force variation, and where the high point in road force variation is located in the tire. After checking and correcting road force if necessary and balancing, the tires with the lowest road force variation go on the front of the truck. The high point of road force variation is marked. No more than 10 grams of imbalance should be allowed, up to 25 lbs of road force variation is allowed but I don't want to see any more than high teens. No more than 6 ounces of weight total should be on each tire, I like to see 3 or less.

I'm also checking wheel runout, rotor lateral runout and parallelism, and hub runout. I don't want to see no more than, oh, maybe .010-.015" wheel runout. I don't want anymore than .003" lateral runout on the rotor, no more than .003" parallelism, no more than .002" hub runout.

The tire is installed onto the hub with the high point mark at 12 O'clock. Tighten the lug nuts to spec and measure between the hub and the center hole in the wheel with a feeler gauge to ensure that the largest wheel to hub gap is at 6:00 on the hub. If the biggest gap isn't at 6:00, I'll break the tire down and spin it 90 or 180 degrees to try to get a new road force high spot, rebalance it and try again.

The little things matter a lot on these trucks.

 

Maybe we should start drilling holds in the frame to lighten it up and make it ride better.

 

Quitin, which GA dealership do you work at?

 

Yeah, also what kind of a tech are you? Heavy line, tranny, master, etc...

 

I work for a little Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Columbus.
Depending on who you ask, I'm a lousy tech, a lazy one, a stupid one, a stressed out one, a burned out one, an irate one, and every now and then, a good one when I have an occasional flash of brilliance.

I specialize in driveability and electrical, but I dabble in all areas. I'm master certified by Uncle Henry. I'm the unofficial last line of defense for problem children vehicles here.

 

So by that logic, and previous or future trucks built will be inferior to the ones with the nibble? Hmmm... Not sure about that. The frame maybe rigid, but they did not properly engineer the steering.

 

Kind of funny to see everyone copying the 2004+ F150, even Toyota claims a full boxed frame, but after reading about frames in general I found this from the Toyota web site.

"The Tundra's advanced TripleTech frame uses wide, full-boxed frame rails for the front portion, reinforced C-channel under the cab and an open C-channel underneath the bed to maximize strength, ride quality and durability.

Compared to the previous Tundra, the new model features more reinforced areas, increased high strength steel, increased steel gauge, and higher-rigidity suspension mounts. The engineering pays dividends in both work capability and ride-and-handling."

It's not a fully boxed frame from end to end like the F-150, but maybe they have a good reason for that.