Wife reported that the steering wheel had begun to shake pretty bad. Claims not to have hit any pot holes or curbs. Took car for a ride and at several different speed the wheel with shake back and forth pretty vigorously. Going to pull car into shop later today, anything typical to look for??? What could be the cause of this starting suddenly???

Thanks

 

Hi - couple of things:

1 - please introduce yourself in the new members thread

2- How about a year and engine option for your car as part of your sig. Mileage is also nice to have when posting questions.

Might have lost some wheel weights from the rim. Was this really a sudden event or is it more a situation of just hitting the right speeds to really notice it or it finally becoming bad enough to notice?

Could have a tire belt let go, suspension is worn etc. When you say "shake back and forth" do you mean left and right? Like sawing at the wheel?

 

zerochills, welcome to the forums. I think you will find a lot of useful information here. So, sit back, enjoy a cup of joe and do a lot of surfing.

As for your problem, this can be caused by a few things. Since this suddenly happened, I would be venturing to guess that your wire brushed a curb and managed to bend a rim. This can be proven the case by simply rotating the tires front to back and back to front. If the shaking goes away, you know it is one of the two tires on the rear now. Pick a side, see if the problem returns. If it does, the side you rotated the tires on for the second time, that front wheel is the one that has issues (could be a bulge in the tire too or some other defect with the tire).

If rotating the tires doesn't make the shaking go away, I would venture to guess you have had a sudden change in your alignment and you now have a severe toe in/out condition (one tire is trying to turn the car left, the other is trying to turn right). This will cause the steering wheel to shake. Putting the car on an alignment rack will atleast tell you what is wrong. A good alignment tech should tell you that the car can't be aligned until XXXXXXX is replaced (with XXXXXXXXX being some part). But, for this to happen, normally you have to hit a good pothole or something like this. For a tie rod to suddenly have issues is unlikely (not saying it can't happen, but normally not).

As Chris X mentioned, please stop by the "New Member" forum and introduce yourself. I think you will find that we are a very friendly bunch and we try to help out each other whenever possible. All we ask is when you find the resolution to your problem, let us know. That way someone in the future that might be having the same issue will have a place to start.

 

welcome to the forum, let me say you will def get a lot of help from this forum, i am talking from experience. a lot of guys take their time to help us solve our problems with the x, Thermo is one of them and i have enough respect for the chap.
for your problem, i had the same situation were my steering wheel was shaking. i took it to a tire shop since i thought i needed wheel balancing. i only found out that one of my front rims was damaged,(bent) so i replaced it and that solved my problem.

 

I always point out to get your struts checked because I had shaking on mine at speeds from 50-70 until I had my front left strut replaced during an inspection. I never realized what the issue was and after replacing that, the car drove shake free. Another common (and much more expensive) cause of shaking that is commonly discussed around here is a bad prop shaft.