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I've had a beast of a time for the last year on my 1999 SE V6 with what seemed to be unbalanced tires. I had a serious shimmy and vibration right around 60, a very typical speed for unbalanced or defective tires to shimmy and vibrate. I wanted to isolate the problem so the first thing I did was rotate tires around the car. For the most part the problem seemed to shift a little, but otherwise remained the same. Since some of my tires were due for replacement I put some "pre-owned" Contis on the car, carefully high speed balanced as observed by me. The problem remained. The car was shimmying badly and not driveable over 60. I moved more tires around and ultimately discarded all four tires and put Contis all around. I also rebalanced everything, as observed by me. There was no significant change in the vibration/shimmy/oscillation. A total of three sets of front tires were mounted on the car, balanced a total of five times up to 80 mph without shimmy or vibration on the balance machine.
Multiple mechanics and tire installers were consulted over time, and this board was extensively researched. Ultimately the opinion was the front bearings were failing and their free play was causing the vibration. I got used axle assemblies and new bearings intending to rebuild the used axles for installation on the car. I have spent many hours trying to remove the old bearings but am unable to do so. Later models have axle assemblies with bearings pre-installed as I understand it. Early models have press-fit bearings which are destroyed on removal.
Because I was unable to press the old bearings out of the replacement hubs my mechanic friend and myself replaced the worst existing hub with the recycled part, as-is. The replacement part appeared to be in rather poor condition, but the bearing seemed tight enough. The result was the vibration/shimmy is reduced by about 50%. We sent the right side hub out to a shop for press-out press-in today, and we'll install it either this week or next. This is not an easy job, IMHO. The hub nut is an absolute beast to loosen. We used a six foot pipe on a breaker bar to crack that nut. The rest of the hub is solidly attached at many points. The left hub took us about 3.5 hours to do. As I said, the outcome is fair, but not perfect. This may well be due to failure of the right bearing. I'll know more in a few days when we replace it.
The dealer does this job for around $300. Next time, that's how I go. The bearing is around $50, and the machine shop is also around $50. I'm paying my friend around $100, so this time I outsmarted myself. Many things can go wrong with this job.
I never had a problem like this before. Bearings were not that hard to do in the past.
posted by 24.91.27...
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