jetpilot

My 87 pickup has a very fine vibration in the front end.....feels and sounds just like when you have knobby tires. I can feel it in the steering wheel, but the wheel doesnt shake. It gets worse at highway speeds, it goes away when I turn to the left and its worse with the hubs locked. I've raised the front end and the wheels both seem to have an equally small about of play in them. I was gonna start with wheel bearings.....any better ideas?

abecedarian

wheel bearings could be a culprit
does it persist if you rotate and rebalance the tires (either front to rear or dismount and cross-rotate)?

jetpilot

I have tried rotating the wheels....no help

Jay351

Hows your idler arm and tie rods?

jetpilot

Tie rods are good, but im not too sure about the idler arm. How do you tell if its bad?

Jay351

Get a friend to get in your truck and turn the wheel back and forth, like half crank one way, then back the other, fairly fast, with no breaks.

watch for ANY vertical movement of the idler arm. More specificly, look where the idler arm goes into its housing, if that part has movement, then your bushings are toast.

Most of the time (this is assuming you have an oem idler arm) they can be rebuilt with new bushings, and are good as new. If yours is really bad, then new bushings won't fix it, the arm itself is done (my case.. yay!)

jetpilot

Thanks for the advice! I'll look into it this weekend.

jetpilot

Idler arm seems fine....How do you diagnose bad wheel bearings, aside from letting them completely fall apart?

1990mudslut

vibration in my steering wheel has always been tires need BALANCING!!Rotating them seems to make it shake even more than before I guess from the way the tires are wearing but I would get them balanced before buying any new parts.Always start with the simplist first.Also you might want to check into the roadrunner?tire balancing machine.It balances hub centric and lug centric rims and I forget which one never balances right on normal machines but the rr can do both.I reccomend from my experiences getting them balanced.

Xeo

I have a similar problem as you at 60km and over I can feel and hear a very loud vibration but when I'm coasting below that or turning it dissappears. I've asked various mechanics and looked around on the net and the only answers I've gotten were improperly balanced tires, balance weights on the torque converter have fallen off, balance weights on the drive shaft have fallen off and a bent CV shaft. Dunno if that helped =/