I think I have finally tackled the elusive wobble problem on the Jeep. The Jeep spends most of its days inside the garage. This is posh, except when sitting for long periods of time my tires were flat spotting from weight and air pressure. When I would take the Jeep out for a spin it would shake violently at about 45 mph. Sometimes you could drive through the shake, but others I would have to get out of the gas.
Well the other day I had finally had it with the shakes. The shaking was making it so I didn’t want to drive the Jeep at all. I knew there were several things that needed to be addressed on the front so I made a list and started to chip away.
First was the drag link tie rod end. With a RockKrawler bomb proof flipped drag link you still use the factory tie rod end. When I switched to the new draglink I didn’t refresh the tie rod end and stayed with the beater factory end. With the wobbles, the tie rod end was now toast. I installed a new drag link tie rod end and went for a drive. Still wobbles! Grrr
Next was the caster angle. Not too long ago I increased the length/lift of my springs. Like any garage Jeep mechanic, I got lazy on resetting the caster and pinion angle on the front. Hoping this was the cause of the wobble I broke down one side lower control arm at a time, rebuilt the bushings and RK joints, and lengthened the control arm to get me back to factory caster specification based on pinion angle. The Jeep still wobbles. Super grrr.
Last was wheel weights. I run bead weights in my tires since I have had mixed luck with tape weights. One thing I noticed on the Cooper STT PRo tires that I installed was the very narrow inner wall gusset groove. This looked like it could be a problem for slinging bead weights within the tire. The valley and gussets looked like they might hold too many weights in a flawed pattern and cause balance issues. I removed the bead rings from the wheels and vacuumed out all the weight beads in the front tires. After reassembly, I test drove the Jeep. Voila! The bead weights were the problem. The Jeep drove very smooth considering I had zero counter-weight applied to 40s.
All of the actions taken could have been suspect for wobble. Which service item to tackle first depends on what you want to do first. I suspected bead weights all along, however, I knew the Jeep needed service for all points mentioned. Service is done. Wobble is gone. Time for LS Swap!