Wheel balancing

Copperman05 · Jul 18, 2012

Locking nuts? Originals should be alloy like the wheels nuts, but thee are expensive so many fit steel ones which cant be good for wheel balance. Edd

Poppers19 · Jul 18, 2012

I have a 944 cab and when travelling at about 60-70 I get a vibration through the wheel, I've had all 4 wheels re-balanced which seems to have helped a little but basically it's still there.

Has anyone any ideas on what I might be missing or have I just suffered a c**p job at kwik-fit?

All thoughts would be much appreciated.

Peter

944 S2 cab

PSH · Jul 18, 2012

I'd say check the front wheel bearings for play, I'd bet on that being the cause. Pete

edh · Jul 18, 2012

Wheel bearings?

craiginuk · Jul 18, 2012

Mine was a front wheel bearing too.

T3rra · Jul 18, 2012

Warped disc have been the cause 4 me in the past, and they were new Porsche parts. Did have a vibration when braking as well. And visual steering wheel shake

andy watson · Jul 18, 2012

Kick-fit.........oh dear

BlackMagic · Jul 19, 2012

I had this problem for many years and changed most parts (bearings, shocks, bushes, etc. etc.). Althought he wheels ran true and balanced up fine, in the end the problem was found to be an eccentric wheel! (Much to the supprise of JMG who had been helping me sort it out) If you can borrow a pair of front wheels and go for a drive, if the vibration dissappears it rules out all other items but the actual wheels (Balance or shape). I now have a car that runs on rails and I wish that I had done it earlier. It would have saved me many years of frustration. William

Lowtimer · Jul 20, 2012

On both my sets of wheels and tyres, my original Turbo set and my alternative S2 set, I've had a lot of wheel balance problems which have only been resolved by, er, having the wheels balanced. Properly. The thing is, very few people seem willing and able to balance wheels with any finesse, and in my experience a 944 is very sensitive to wheel balance, possibly because the wheels are a lot lighter than you would find on your average BMW or Golf, and the tyres are therefore heavier in relation to the wheels than on most cars. I've had quite poor wheel balancing done, or perhaps more accurately "attempted", by tyre places generally, and by one well known old Porsche specialist in the north of England (not Hartech!) I've had very good wheel balancing done by Promax Motorsport in the past, though Andy has sold the good wheel balancer now as it wasn't getting enough volume of throughput to justify its keep. When I had a new set of tyres on the newly refurbed S2 wheels that are currently on the car, Promax hadn't got their balancer any more and no-one else could get it right. The car had perfect wheel bearings, all fully rebuilt suspension with every bush replaced, new factory dampers, and a full geometry set-up, so I knew that wasn't the problem It was driving me mad. I ended up taking the car to a place in Gateshead, Tam Tyres, where they have a Hunter GSP9700 road force balancer - that's one of these... http://www.pro-align.co.uk/proalignproducts/roadforcebalancer/ It measures a lot more parameters than a standard wheel balancer, and with a good operator can work to much finer tolerances than most tyre places are prepared to work to. It was about an hour's work, involving demounting and rotating one of the tyres on its rim, and the end solutions they came up with involved the car having far fewer balance weights on it than either of the two previous attempts. It drives perfectly now from a standstill to autobahn speeds of over 130 mph. It was not expensive to do, I think they did it for the same price as a standard balance because I had already taken the wheels off the car and cleaned them up, so it took them less time. Makes a huge difference to the car, getting it absolutely, spot-on right.