Couple of weeks ago I found a balance weight in my drive so decided to get a rebalance. I had only just had the 'free' rotaion and balance from BJ since fitting new wheels and tyres.
Next day on the freeway car was vibrating at about 100/110. Dropped it back to BJ and they rebalanced and said wheels were out and no charge. This morning car is vibrating worse than before.
Its not solely through the steering wheel but seems to be throughout the car.
I am going to take it somewhere else this week for another balance/rotaion and see if it fixes the problem.
Up until this ocurred the car was smooth as at speed.

How many km on the car? Lots of possible reasons, depending on km.

How many km on the car?


75000k

I would look at front and rear wheel alignment. It's unlikely to be ball joints, wheel bearings, tie rod ends, rack ends. Hit any curbs lately with a front or rear wheel?

Not as far as I know. I value my new rims too much. However, some of the potholes around here are pretty bad and I may have dropped a wheel in one or two.
I have booked the car into another dealer this afternoon for a rebalance and rotation. If that doesnt fix it I will get a wheel alignment organised
Cheeeeers

Chris,

It's possible one or more of your wheels or tyres are 'out of round', and no amount of balancing will fix it/them.

This happened to me a while ago, I had one wheel which was a bit dodgy and two tyres that were not completely round.

You could see the 'out of roundness' on the balancing machine.

KJ.

So, you had no issues, you found a weight in the drive way, got it balanced and then vibration. Sorry Max, can not be other issues causing this. While there may be other issues clearly this is a wheel / tyre issue

I would have hoped that when the balance was done that an out of round tyre would have been found out, could be that the balancer is out of sync or the person doing just has NFI about what they are doing

Take it somewhere else, get them to check for round tyres as well as balance. IF they find is out of balance get them to write down how much and on what wheel and go back to the original place and demand your new cost for the balance to be covered as they clearly after 2 attempts cannot do the balance

I am hoping its a NFI issue. The rims and tyres are almost new. Only done 3000k
I was concerned after the rebalance that they found all 4 tyres were out, even though they had balanced it the week before when I lost the weight and only a couple of weeks before when I had a full balance and rotation.
I have it booked an at another place this afternoon. New business, never been there before

Well..... It seems not my car but the roadsurface on the new northern expressway.
Hats off to this guy who, when I told him my route to work said he has had several people including truckies with similar issues.
He suggested I find another section of road and give it a try. So I came home a different route and at 100-110 absolutely no vibration

Funny that! The new Northern Expressway gave me the same result, at the same speed. Lots of wobbles, but seeing my car has 240,000 km on it, I changed the ball joints, which fixed the problem. (Yes, I took it back over the same road to check.)

Perhaps the roadway has some sort of grooving for water drainage? Nothing unusual to see though.

This tyre guy reckons trucks are bouncing around the road between 40-60kph. Something about not rolling the surface properly

So, warning for SA Northeners - if you use the Expressway, watch out for slow moving out of control trucks. lol

Weird or what though.

Yep, typical SA road building effort.

Take forever to build it, half do it, and then stuff it up.

There's a section of freeway near where I live that is similar - vibration generally around the 90kmh mark for a few hundred metres section of road - I first noticed it after a rotation and balance, but eventually figured it affected our other car too, just hadn't paid attention previously as it was pretty minor. It was resurfaced a few months ago and surprise, surprise, problem is gone...

Have since noticed it in small sections of the same freeway about 25kms further north - seems to be reasonably common to varying degrees, I think some of us are just more critical of small vibrations and notice it more than others - my wife had never noticed it until I pointed it out.