It's cold again. Guess who's back? Old St. Death Wobble. (edit-Not true DW, just a big shimmy)

[ShadowsPapa]

Problem is there's a mix of things going on here - they are not all the same, and not all the same causes.
DW is one thing, tire flat spots -a very REAL thing, are something else, then there are shimmies, wheel balance issues, defective tires and so on.
Lifts - especially over ~2" need some sort of geometry correcting and to run other than stock angles on things. It's a change in the design and geometry, throwing some parts out of parallel, leading to bowing and flexing of certain parts in the suspension and steering.
The brackets that drop the rear ends of the control arms and bring things back into parallel or at least closer to normal design parameters, IMO, are a must on a lift like some are talking about here. I personally would not go over 2" without recentering the front axle and dropping the rear of the control arms to bring them back to parallel, and move at least to the top of the caster spec (some say over that - fine if it works, each vehicle has a personality)

Anyway, back to the original thought - we've got quite a mix of symptoms and causes.
Tires are the issue for many of these, but not all.
The bigger and beefier the tire, the more problematic it's going to be, especially in colder weather. And the tougher it's going to be to control what they do.

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[Pilsner]

As a side note, one thing is now certain. If you think you have death wobble, you don't. You KNOW immediately when you have DW. I've had some shimmy before, but nothing like that.

 

[cranbiz]

You don't have DW. If you did, you would have violent shaking which won't go away until you almost come to a complete stop. Your shaking going away at 45 MPH indicates a possible tire balance issue, flat spots or a suspension angle issue.

Believe me, I know Death Wobble, you don't have it.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

You don't have DW. If you did, you would have violent shaking which won't go away until you almost come to a complete stop. Your shaking going away at 45 MPH indicates a possible tire balance issue, flat spots or a suspension angle issue.

Believe me, I know Death Wobble, you don't have it.

My observations and experience says you don't drive through it, you back away from it (then go change clothes)
Wheel and tire issues you can sometimes drive through - keep speeding up until you are above the issue. With DW - you'd have a different sort of DW to do that - Death Wish.

 

[cranbiz]

My observations and experience says you don't drive through it, you back away from it (then go change clothes)
Wheel and tire issues you can sometimes drive through - keep speeding up until you are above the issue. With DW - you'd have a different sort of DW to do that - Death Wish.

Absolutely right, you can't drive through Death Wobble even if you have a death wish.

I was about 100 miles from home when mine happened. It took about 5 hours to get home, going no more than 40 MPH and praying to the All Mighty for no bumps in the road to trigger it again. Bridge expansion joints were the devil. That was before trailer.

 

[In3briatedPanda]

Absolutely right, you can't drive through Death Wobble even if you have a death wish.

I was about 100 miles from home when mine happened. It took about 5 hours to get home, going no more than 40 MPH and praying to the All Mighty for no bumps in the road to trigger it again. Bridge expansion joints were the devil. That was before trailer.

100% agree, my shimmy is not death wobble. Ive experienced it once in a Ford truck, my shimy was NOT what happened to us. WOW.

I went through my metalcloak and retorqued everything. I honestly believe i have a tire issue, but for the steering damper to fix it, idk if something was loose the tech fixed. Im two years on my lift and three years on my tires. about 20k on the tires.

I want to take my tires and put them on a different set of wheels and run them for a month, if the shimmy stays its tires, if its goes away, then maybe i have too aggressive of a wheel or another problem.

i modified my jeep, its on me to figure it out. thats just me. Jeep band aided it and now i gotta fix it. lol



to add to my shimmy complaint, whether i kept my JT in the attached garage which is usually 15-20 degrees warmer/cooler than outside, or kept it parked outside i had the same issue. house built in 1999 and im missing about 6 inches of the garage door plastic seal on the right side. LMAO.

 

[Wheelin98TJ]

An attached garage in any house built in the last 15 or 20 years ago should be significantly more moderate that the ambient temps overnight. In most parts of the country the delta should be on the order of 15 to 20 degrees. So unless it gets below about 10 degrees or so nothing should freeze in your garage overnight. If it does you need to fix this issue…

Now back to our regularly scheduled discussion….?

My house was built in 1920 and it has an attached one car garage. I had it insulated 5-7 years ago.

This morning, the garage was 60 degrees and the outside temp was 34. High temp yesterday was about 40, so it wasn't warmed up from yesterday.

 

[MPMB]

We should all be happy bias-ply tires are rare these days. My grandparents had a motorhome shod with bias-ply. It took 50-60 miles before the flatspots finally got worked out.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

I want to take my tires and put them on a different set of wheels and run them for a month, if the shimmy stays its tires, if its goes away, then maybe i have too aggressive of a wheel or another problem.

Wheels can contribute due to the change of scrub radius some can impart (depending backspacing)
Wheel backspacing directly impacts scrub radius - of course diameter changes have to come into play as well.
A change in scrub radius can make the tire want to pivot left-right-left-right around the "king pin" (which in our case consists of the two ball joints.)
In short, many times the DW can be linked to a change in scrub radius..
That's why I always ask anyone who has a wobble in general, DW specifically, if it's stock wheels and tires, and so on.
A large change in diameter without compensating with different wheels can cause DW, or different wheels that change scrub radius can cause a wobble - even DW.


Positive scrub radius (KPI line or SAI line hits the ground inside the center of the contact patch) imparts a toe out force on the tires. This is typical of RWD cars. Negative scrub radius (KPI/SAI line hits the ground outside of the center of the contact patch) imparts a toe in force on the tires.
This is why some with modified wheel and tire sizes appear to do better with a bit of toe out, to compensate for the change of the forces caused by the tire and/or wheel changes.
And it's why you can't say "use my specs, they'll fix your situation" because once wheels and tires are changed - there's no comparing these vehicles.

 

[Bonanza]

This isn't death wobble, as I've had full blown DW before. This is a big shimmy. It does shake the wheel to the point I can't manually resist it, but it isn't DW.

I suspect this is a tire issue, as when the tires are more inflated, I get no issues. For the first 2 miles of my commute, even the slightest aberration in the road surface can trigger it, at a very certain speed. I can speed out of it, and I can slow out of it, but the Fox ATS won't stop it on its own if I do nothing.

I'm not going to chase the dragon anymore trying to stop this, as it's just part of Jeep (on 37s) ownership. All of my Jeeps have had it, each with different lifts, tires, wheels, etc. I will say trying to warm up the tires like an F1 driver would do also mitigates the onset of the wobble. My tires are 35-36 in the afternoon, but drop to 31-32 psi in the morning. I imagine the tires were balanced at a higher PSI from america's tire, so that might contribute as well.

Everything after the first 2 miles of daily driving experience is perfectly fine, so that's good enough for me.

 

[smlobx]

My house was built in 1920 and it has an attached one car garage. I had it insulated 5-7 years ago.

This morning, the garage was 60 degrees and the outside temp was 34. High temp yesterday was about 40, so it wasn't warmed up from yesterday.

It could be from several sources..
- did they insulate the wall between the garage and house? Your home could be leaking heat into the garage.
- when you drove in the vehicle did you close the garage door immediately? The vehicle (motor) is quite warm and you may have trapped the heat in the garage.
- Alien space heaters? ?

 

[Wheelin98TJ]

It could be from several sources..
- did they insulate the wall between the garage and house? Your home could be leaking heat into the garage.
- when you drove in the vehicle did you close the garage door immediately? The vehicle (motor) is quite warm and you may have trapped the heat in the garage.
- Alien space heaters? ?

The wall between the house and garage is insulated. Probably the biggest source of heat coming from the house is the door from the garage to the house that is used fairly frequently.

Drove the vehicle in? People park vehicles in their garages? ?

For the heater, just a little electric that I try not to use. It hasn't been on since Feb or March.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Until the frost sets in and the ground freezes - heat coming up from the ground.
Once you hit mid-winter, the ground is frozen and not much of a heat source.
The house wall, unless insulated to R100, is still helping warm the area a bit. There's heat loss through the studs into the garage.

My neighbor just had a 500 gallon water tank put into his garage so he'll have water over the winter since we've been without rain so long (any appreciable rain, that is) and his well is on the edge of dry. Since there won't be any more ground water coming in thanks to winter, he's figuring on running clear out of water. His truck will sit outside for the winter.

 

[MPMB]

Until the frost sets in and the ground freezes - heat coming up from the ground.
Once you hit mid-winter, the ground is frozen and not much of a heat source.
The house wall, unless insulated to R100, is still helping warm the area a bit. There's heat loss through the studs into the garage.

My neighbor just had a 500 gallon water tank put into his garage so he'll have water over the winter since we've been without rain so long (any appreciable rain, that is) and his well is on the edge of dry. Since there won't be any more ground water coming in thanks to winter, he's figuring on running clear out of water. His truck will sit outside for the winter.

Speaking of water (OT is my specialty, lol)... UT has had one of the wettest years in quite some time (you're welcome). I "yelled" at my wife when it rained this summer "I could have been harvesting!!!" as our plan is to collect roof runoff for landscaping. We're allowed to store 2500gal. I calculated our eventual garden would need about 800gal. Our roof runoff estimate is 6000, and an additional 2200 off the new gazebo. But the water harvesting project is priority 1000 right now.

BOT... sort of... when the weather got colder, a road by our house got bumpy. Ground water change I assume, since asphalt is permeable. Every year it seemed to happen. No matter what I drove I could feel it and think I had a flat, but then remember it's the road.

 

[ShadowsPapa]

Speaking of water (OT is my specialty, lol)... UT has had one of the wettest years in quite some time (you're welcome). I "yelled" at my wife when it rained this summer "I could have been harvesting!!!" as our plan is to collect roof runoff for landscaping. We're allowed to store 2500gal. I calculated our eventual garden would need about 800gal. Our roof runoff estimate is 6000, and an additional 2200 off the new gazebo. But the water harvesting project is priority 1000 right now.

BOT... sort of... when the weather got colder, a road by our house got bumpy. Ground water change I assume, since asphalt is permeable. Every year it seemed to happen. No matter what I drove I could feel it and think I had a flat, but then remember it's the road.

We're used to the roads changing with the season - summer heat/sun swells the concrete and it heaves, winter water gets through cracks and such, and it heaves as the ground freezes, even our driveway has shifted due to the drought, then last winter's freezing heaving up one section but not another. The ground is so dry that I can stand down the hill by my shop a few feet and actually look UNDER the floor slab. It hasn't happened yet, but a few years ago it was bad enough it was snapping underground power cables as the ground shrank away from buildings.

The solution on the roads/streets around here is that they travel around with big grinders and level off the heaves and humps, and drop blacktop into the holes and low spots. Then a few big rigs pass by and it's all for naught.

I know it's far worse in other areas, but we're down a good foot or more just since about April on our normal rain.

Back to our normally scheduled DW - death wish/death wobble, lumpy tires, lumpy roads, lumpy ???

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