i just put on 18" rims with hankook tires. and now my car has a slight shaking to it between 60 mph and 70 mph. what can i do? is it the balancing of the tires is wrong or is it the size of the rim? or size of the tire?
Probably need to get them balanced with a really good machine. That equals a Hunter Roadforce balancing system (click here for more info & a dealer locator for finding a Hunter equipped garage neear you). Has solved MANY a problem like yours.
Just in case, what size wheels & tires are you running? Improper sizing will not cause vibration; insteat you'd see some sort of rubbing.
Same thing happend to me when I put 18s on my 99....i had them rebalanced and it helped some but still has some shimmy around 60-70. What are these hub rings your are talking about mike?
Now Ray... I thought we got past this yelling thing.
They're called hubcentric rings. They need to be matched between the Audi hub and the wheel in question. If you don't have them, you'd need to get them from the wheel manufacturer or one of their dealers.
I have a 00 A6 2.7T with eh 6 speed manual and the sport package and stock rims. I want to Les Schwab which does have the GSP9700 and I still have vibration between 60-70. Is there anything else that could cause is or are they not useing the machine correctly?
Vibration through the wheel at a particularl speed is usually caused by an imbalance with a wheel(s). If a hunter system doesn't pick it up, I'm not sure what will. Have you asked them for the printout from the Hunter system? It will reveal, numerically, the balance of each wheel.
Otherwise, let's hope somebody else has something to offer on this.
i used the hunter wheel balancer. before i used it only the steering wheel shook between 60-70. after i used the hunter now the steering wheel doesnt shake at all but the whole car shakes between 60 and 75. after 75 its all good. what do i doooooooooooooooo?
Ya got me stumped. I'll be watching this one though, because I've got a good friend who has the same problem. With any luck, somebody else on the forum can help us out...
What were your roadfore readings. The machine wont recognize a wheel/tire assembly in the 15-25 pound range as bad but those numbers can be significant enough to cause a vibration.
A slightly out of round wheel could balance out perfectly, yet you would notice it vibrating at highway speeds. I had this issue with an OEM wheel that had hit a pothole.
What type of wheels EXACTLY are you running? Did you determine if they are hubcenctric or not? If you mount up a non-hubcentric wheel without an adapter spacer, then the wheel will vibrate and shake at speed (act like it is out of round) due to it not being perfectly centered on the hub. This is also a dangerous situation, as the sheer stress is being applied to the lug bolts, and not to the wheel hub like it should be.
OEM wheels as in they have an Audi four ring stamp on the inside near the hub, or OE Wheels as in the eBay retailer that sells knock-off wheels in great quantities?
O.E. Wheels on eBay are not Audi manufactured OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer), therefore of unknown quality. They are made at a knock-off factory, in Taiwan or Korea or China, who knows? As such, who knows what type of quality control they have. It could be that the great majority of the wheels that they sell are just fine, and one in one hundred or one in one thousand has unacceptable quality, yet their Quality Control didn't catch it. Good QC costs money, and this is usually where most overseas manufacturer's skimp on costs. Any good tire shop worth its salt would be able to determine if the problem is the wheel or the tire though. By the way, what kind of tires did you put on them?
Also, have you had the wheel bearings and CV joints checked as well? Brake rotors can also cause vibration. Any thing that has mass and spins (which includes the half-shafts and CV joints, wheels, tires, and brake rotors), can cause vibration. The fact that you notice it at a particular speed means that the vibration has reached a harmonic, or a 'critical speed'. When you obtain harmonics, the imbalance does not have to be very large for the effects of the harmonic frequency to be felt. Think of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that collapsed. It was shaking so badly that it shook itself apart due to the wind achieving a harmonic resonance due to a phenomenon called vortex shedding.
If it was me, I would first put back on the OEM wheels you had on before and see if your vibration problem has gone away or not. If it does, then you know it is either wheels or tires. If not, then it is something else, like maybe CV joints or warped brake rotor. If it is your new wheels / tires, the tire shop should be able to determine which wheel is bad, and determine if it is the wheel or tire. I have seen brand spanking new tires that couldn't be balanced out before, where the tire had a massive heavy spot. At that time the tire shop I went to was trying to blame my wheels and sell me a new set of wheels... I called BS and had them try to remount the tire on another known good rim (my spare rim). The tire tech hadn't checked the balance of the rim before he mounted up the tire :( Later on another tire out of that set developed a massive flat spot. I'll never buy Cooper tires again, and I'll never use Perfection Tire shop again.
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shaking on highway with new rims - 
