I have found that the majority of the shimmy I have been experiencing lately has been resolved by simply switching the front tires to the opposite side. This makes me wonder if something is going on concerning the belts or the treads. Perhaps despite being on trued wheels that have been roadforced to death, they develope a rotational "preference" after a while, and don't roll well when moved to the other side. I've been dealing with 17in Falken 722 All Seasons and 18in Bridgestone Protenza summer tires, both non-directional.

After a day of sorting and changing tires combined with more than a few trips to the crosstown interstate, I managed to find very smooth rides from both sets. I now have them all marked inside the wheels as "LF", "RF", "RR" and "LR", and they will be mounted that way from now on with no exceptions! haha.

 

I hope an expert checks in here and enlightens us.

But I had a problem like this when I got the V70R....nothing would make two of the wheels balance on the front....they are fine on the rear.....so I keep them marked and never let the shop change them to the front.

Have the winter tires on and plan to see if the rear OEM five spoke wheels can be 'trued' to see if that will help.

In fact they are notoriously 'soft' wheels prone to pot-hole and curb damage.

I am concerned that if this fixed the problem for you Skid that the rest of the work you had done was unnecessary or dare I say premature.....

Let us know what you think about that.

Because I am about to start down the same road with a very small vibration in the front tires of the XKR....if that doesn't resolve from balancing I am going to move directly to your trick and rotate them back to front.

cheers,

jj

 

The alignment was still poor at the start, particulary camber. The top shock mounts were gone, and other bushings, so I feel like I did the right thing. I've been swapping the front tires for several weeks now, and was noticing improvement, but not the resolution I got yesterday. I am just surprised that the tread/belt theory seems to be the only explanation I can come up with, due to the non-directional marketing of the tires

 

I thought the tires were different sizes front/back 245F/255R or 285 so probably not a good idea to switch front to rear. If you have non directional tires you might want to throw them out and at least buy some performance tires these are usually all directional. Bet most of your problems will go away as they say you get what you pay for when it comes to tires. I have Hankook (XKR 245/255 18inch) cheap directional and for the price better than the Michelins I had b4.

 

I'm not switching front to rear, I'm switching left to right on the front to find the smoothest direction of rotation for the tires.

 

Hi Skid Mark. Top marks for perserverience!

When I took both of my front wheels off to take the wheelarch liners out I marked the wheel positions with a small red paint spot so that the wheel goes back on the same stud just incase the hub or wheel is slightly out.Since the car has been used more that wobble I had a 70mph seems to have gone perhaps the tires had "flats" due to standing.Also I cleaned the mating surface of the wheel and hub when reinstalling the wheels.
Glad you are closer to sorting out, you could do with trying someone else's wheels and tires to see if your shimmey goes.

Cheers Al

 

Skid;

Are you saying you had them on 'backwards' before???

You didn't notice when you were going 70mph in reverse there was no vibration?

Dopey me just realized that of course on the XKR I can't switch tires front to back....twit.

So I will try putting them on 'backwards' on the front if I have to.

cheers,

jj

 

You must not put directional tyres on backwards!
What you can do is take the tyres off the rims and swap them left to right.
So the outer of the left tyre becomes the inner of the right and vice versa.
There are places over here that have Hunter road force machines which can tell which tyre should go on which wheel and inside or outside for directional tyres.

 

These are marketed as "non directional" tires, which means they are supposed to be able to roll in either direction. I'm saying that in some cases that may not be true, so they should be mounted on either the left or right side and kept there.

 

When I had Bridgestone RE050A tires(directional), I also tried to rotate left to right. The shop unmounted the tires from the wheels and swapped left to right.

After that, I noticed a pull to the left.

Now I have Bridgestone Turanza tires(non-directional), I had them swapped left to right.
After that, I now also have a pull to the left.

Maybe because of the non-symetrical jaguar alignment, it is better not to rotate. Any more experiences?

 

Hi, regarding your problems with wheel shimmy, try loosening the wheel nuts slightly, then use a torque wrench to re-tighten them. Should be about 76 ft/lbs.
When the tyre fitter puts the nuts on with an air wrench, they can be over-tightened or unevenly tightened. You could also jack up the front of the car and spin the tyres while they are still attached and note any out of round while looking from the side or lateral movement while looking from the front.
good luck

Fredd60

 

Hi Regarding the torque on the wheel bolts different size wheels may require more torque.Jaguar service told me 100ft/lbs for my Daytona's.

Cheers Al

 

On the "rotate in the other direction" thing ...

I had a similar situation last year: New Michelin PS all-seasons, which are directional. Slight pull to the right. I wanted to try a simple left/right swap without remounting the tires on their rims, to see if the pull changed.

Michelin tech support told me this: It's OK to have such tires rotating in the "wrong" direction. The only effect of this is that the tread is then not optimized for shedding water or snow. No other performance issues. (This is consistent with some other sources, so I'm pretty sure it's the right story.)

Same with asymmetric tires mounted "wrong side out".

Interesting (to me anyway) side note that we'll probably never see an asymmetric, directional street tire. This because the left side and right side versions of such a tire would be mirror images of each other and so they would need to manufacture two separate tires. Not likely.

 

I do torque them to 80lbs every time I change them. I spun 6 of the 8 tires on the front wheels and found only one that had any rim rise at all, so that one became a rear tire.

When I bought the Falkens the store manager told me that in his opinion non directional tires still should not be rotated to opposite sides (L vs R) due to tread issues. Something about "hot spots" forming. Maybe that's part of what I experienced. Either way I have smooth rides from both sets of tires now, they're all marked for certian lugs on certian hubs and will stay that way.