Wheel Vibration on the Highway Could be Out of Balance

Does your vehicle shake on the highway? That's what we're gonna talk about in this video.

So, you have a vibration while you're driving on the highway. For some reason everyone thinks they need an alignment. Now, an alignment has nothing to do with vibration. The purpose of the alignment is to make sure the tires are going down the road straight, making good contact with the ground so that you don't wear the tires out prematurely. The reason why you would have an alignment done is if you just had tires replaced, or you place any front-end components, or your steering wheel was off-center. This is gonna prolong the life of your tires. What we wanna do is take a look at the tires. See if there's anything obvious, any abnormal wear in the tires, if it looks like it's extremely choppy. Take a look at the outside of the tire if you have wheel weights, see if there's any wheel weights on the tire. This vehicle doesn't have any wheel weights that are visual. And same with there. Sometimes wheel weights fall off. It's unlikely but it does happen. You wanna go around the car and grab every tire and just give it a shake, make sure none of the suspension or steering components are loose. If you have something like a bad inner or outer tie rod that's excessive, that could cause a vibration. Most of the time, the reason why your vehicle vibrates is the tire balance is off. So, we're gonna take these wheels off and bring it over to the tire balancer.

When they build the tire, there is gonna be some slight imperfections in the rubber, there could be a little bit more rubber on this side than this side. Or there's steel belts in between the tire and those could be shifted just slightly on the tire. And that's gonna cause the tire to not be exactly perfect. And the rim itself could also have some imperfections where it's just slightly heavier on one side than the other. Because of that, we're gonna have to balance the tire, you have to put weights on the tire either on the outside, on the backside, or there is also sticky weights that can go on the inside of the rim itself or right there. Because we're trying to diagnose why we have a vibration, what we're gonna do is leave these wheel weights on and we're gonna put it on a machine like this to check the balance. If the balance checks out, we know it probably wasn't the tires that were causing the vibration. But if it's off, then those wheel weights are either in the wrong spot, or they just need to be rebalanced.

Check your tire pressure and adjust accordingly. I have the machine all set up, I put in all the measurements. And now we're just gonna spin it up, we still have those weights on and see if we have a problem. These are our readings that we got from the tire. So, this being 2.75 ounces on the outside of the tire and 0.75 on the inside of the tire. This is definitely gonna give us a tire vibration. Anything above 0.25 could potentially give you a tire vibration and this is way off the chart. We're gonna take the wheel weights off, re-spin the tire, see what we end up with and see if we can fix this vibration. After spinning it again, with no weights on it the amount required to balance this tire is actually less than what we had originally started with. So, it's asking for three quarters or 0.75 ounces. So, we're gonna take a weight that's a 0.75 ounce and also a half ounce or 0.5 ounces. So, we're gonna put this on the inside and put this on the outside. We need to turn the wheel so the machine will tell us where to put the weight. And then we're gonna put the weight right at the top of the rim on that side. And that's exactly what you want. You want the outside and the inside to be zero, which is perfect. So, we balance that up, we shouldn't have any more vibration out of this tire, so I just got to do the same for the other three. You may also have a bent rim or an outer round tire that may not show up on the balancer results. Take a look at the tire and rim while it's on the machine spinning and if it looks bent that could potentially give you a vibration as well, even though the tire balances out.

In our case, it was just the tires being out of balance, we just had to balance them up. Most of the time when you have vibration on the highway it's due to the tires being out of balance. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring that bell, turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.