I hear my wife whine quite a bit. Does that count for warranty work? Think I just need to give her a good alignment and balancing? I might just have to do that...

RP

 

rock,

it seems to me that after a good balance and rotation...it is usually the wife/girlfriend who lets the air out of the tires!!!

 

ya'll have a good point. Joe adjusted my torrsion bars when we rotated the tires. And that is when this whine/ vibration/or whatever it is started. Maybe I should just take it in and have them check the alignment/balance and anything else.

 

Hey Skagel, just my experience with a very similar problem. On my wife's old Diamante it started doing the same exact thing, and it got worse sometimes when the tires were rotated. It was so subtle that she didn't notice it. I just blew it off as a balancing issue. Well, a couple years later after a rotation all of a sudden it REALLY started to vibrate, especially in a low speed turn. I made her drive the Expi to work untill I got the car looked at, thought it might be a tie rod or something coming loose. Well, the shop took a look at the tires and the tread was separating from the tire. When they took the tire off you could see the rip and the steel belts inside of the tire. I'm assuming that the separation was always the cause of the vibration it just took 2 years for it to finally come apart.

Anyway, pay attention to it. I would suggest having the tires closely examined if you can't resolve the issue another way. The separation on the wife's car happened where the tread meets with the inside sidewall. We consider ourselves lucky that it didn't have a complete blowout at 75mph. I had an 83 Lesabre that had a separated tire when I bought it also. That one had a big bump in the middle of the tread. Not trying to scare ya, but I've learned that tire imperfections need to be taken seriously and payed attention to. If anyone else has had experience with tire separations please post your experience.

 

wow......I don't have stock tires on Tomas.....when I ordered him I had them take the crappy RT/S's off and put AT/S's on. Now they changed the design of the AT/S's since Joe got his AT/S's on his truck. so comparing mine to his is out of the question. I checked the tread when we rotated them, but I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. I was really just looking for nails and whatnot though.

Thanks for your input I will have Joe check me tread out for me on friday.

 

By the way you described the problem, if it is a separation it may not be noticable to the untrained eye. I'm not saying that Joe has an untrained eye but a good tire dealership may be able to notice or test for things you wouldn't recognize. FYI

 

Oh and btw, the tires we had problems with were after market tires (I forget the brand) and it started not long after we got them. They only had 25K when the tread started to visibly break open.

 

oh man now I am afraid to drive Tomas again.........looks like he will be sitting in the garage again until I figure this out.

yep the ricer is parked outside my office window today......so, so, so very sad.

Hey Logical ya know of any "good" tire shops around us?

 

skagel,

i'm assuming that the b/f adjusted the torsion bars to lift the front end higher?? if so, you'll prolly notice a stiffer/more vibration prone ride do to the fact that there is more tension on the bars...just a thought...

 

ya know that I never thought of, but you are right.....but he did the same thing to his truck and, although I am not aloud to drive his, I don't think he is having the same problem.....and he notices everything.....I mean everything. but I will bring this point up to him too. Thanks sooooo much for everyones advice and input.....I have a lot to do now.

 

b/f doesn't allow you to drive his truck, but you allow him to drive thomas!!!! hummmm...better put the smack down on his ****!!!

 

LOL....yah, to bad I'm whipped. and the saddest thing is...I can afford to replace his truck....no way could he afford mine.

 

You are probably still hauling sand from the dunes some where under your KR

 

LOL very funny......actually I still have sand under the truck.....I was washing the engine and my master cylinder was covered in the stuff.

Joe drove Tomas this weeked and said the the noise I was hearing was coming from my brush guard. He has the same brush guard and has the same noise....It is a different brush guard from the one I had before.

Thanks for all the help and making me into a very paraniod little girl.

 

yeah, that's my fault, sorry. Hey, I got an old hick style trouble shooting method for the tires. Take the wheels off another F-150 and see if you get the same problem. Might be a dumb idea, if anyone else has any feedback.

That's the thing I hate about strange noises and feels in a car, you never know what it is for sure.

Oh, and another thing with the problem we had with the diamante. You could notice the problem more when you went around a sharp corner turning to the left. most likely because the separation was kinda on the side of the tire. I think my old Buick just felt like I was driving over something every time the wheel made a revolution, but when I got it the tire was shot from the start.