Still having death wobble issues
- Thread starter Cooper Smith
- Start date
Some pictures of the front end components would be good for the folks on here to see problems. Your spacers and that set up would indicate maybe some other half assed work on the part of the PO ?? D
I’ll take some tomorrow morning. Everything honestly looks pretty decent other than the drag link and track bar angles from the lift.
Try the test for bad rod ends above in post #18. Those and/or imperfectly balanced tires are the usual causes of DW.
The very worst case of OMG hang on life passing before my eyes DW I ever experienced was on my then still nearly new 97 TJ after the balancing weights came off a front wheel. Rebalancing that front tire was the cure.
The very worst case of OMG hang on life passing before my eyes DW I ever experienced was on my then still nearly new 97 TJ after the balancing weights came off a front wheel. Rebalancing that front tire was the cure.
Aww, bless your heart!
OP, what is the condition of your shocks? When I had DW, it was a combination of 5 year old original tires, and a blown drivers shock.
Remove your steering damper, set one end on the ground, then push down on it. Does it move rather easily?
Now multiply that force times a lot. Tell me that is going to stop the wheels from moving back and forth wildly once they get started. Wait, how did that get started? I have a steering damper.
All the damper does is mild dampening of road effects. Remove it and the Jeep should drive absolutely fine. It’s only there to dampen the harshness. Nothing more.
If some engineer thought the 50:50 damper would stop DW, he should have been kicked out of undergraduate education.
I’ve driven Jeeps with no steering stabilizer, and hardly noticed any difference from those that had them…
Ok,
This is me asking an honest question with no button pushing...
I have built and/or maintained a ton of SFA (and even 2wd with a damper) stuff, where just the presence of a damper or having a not blown out damper controlled oscillation.
Like completely dialed in front end in every way, where the addition or replacement of a blown out damper cured all that ales you.
How is this platform any different than every single vehicle that has ever left the factory since the beginning of automotive time with a steering damper?
This is me asking an honest question with no button pushing...
I have built and/or maintained a ton of SFA (and even 2wd with a damper) stuff, where just the presence of a damper or having a not blown out damper controlled oscillation.
Like completely dialed in front end in every way, where the addition or replacement of a blown out damper cured all that ales you.
How is this platform any different than every single vehicle that has ever left the factory since the beginning of automotive time with a steering damper?
Jeeps, and many others (ford, Chevy, etc) really only started putting them on vehicles mid to late ‘70’s… DW really wasn’t as big a deal with the leaf springs as it is in coil setups. Coil setups have way more points of failures that will be exploited by tires that are bad. (Balance, out of round, separated belts, etc). DW cause is always tires. Trigger is a bump. Effect is the opposite tires oscillating and jerking the front end all over the road.
what the damper does, it it attempts to absorb the oscillation before it really becomes apparent.
If a steering stabilizer can go “bad” and allow death wobble, That means every jeep has death wobble and we are all at the mercy of our steering stabilizers.
But then it gets confusing because you can remove the steering stabilizer and it will drive down the road exactly the same- The steering stabilizer will only soften a hard hit. As it was designed. It’s nothing more than a horizontal shock absorber. For decades Ford trucks never had a steering stabilizer and it was actually an aftermarket bolt on option.
In reality if a steering damper can work so effectively that it will eliminate death wobble there wouldn’t be many death wobble threads, and the world would be proliferated with high end steering stabilizers that we would pay untold amounts of money for.
Also then we have to question why do we still have so much death wobble? Every vehicle comes equipped with a stabilizer and they rarely fail.
If a steering stabilizer can do a little bit to calm dw, that is actually normal because its’ job is to cushion the movement of the linkage. It doesn’t have any choice but to influence the movement, but it is not designed for that purpose. No more than the vehicle was designed to have death wobble.
Now back to the problem-
If a vehicle has death wobble, You either have tires that are out of balance that are creating the autoisolation of the linkage, overpowering the natural gyroscopic and caster influence to run straight...or....you have bad connections, loose bolts or rarely, something very freaky.
Now when you think about that, it really isn’t always one of the other- Most of the time if the tires aren’t being maintained the steering probably hasn’t been touched in 100,000 miles or more. So realistically you can have some of everything going on and this is why a lot of vehicles just plain drive bad and feel sloppy and vague.
Anybody can get on here and argue everything I just said until the cows come home but until you get in one of these with great tires that are properly mounted and fantastic connections you can then only understand how good they can be.
Dampening away death wobble is not fixing anything and it will only be a matter of time before death wobble rares its ugly head, because the cause, not the effect, was never dealt with.
If I fixed death wobble (and I have fixed it many times and it stayed fixed) with a steering stabilizer that would be like shooting your neighbor because he mows the yard early in the morning- It might solve the problem but I wouldn’t tell anybody.
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Realistically, The coil spring design allows the frame and tub to float and consequently all the stress is on the control arms and control arm bushings which include the track bars- That’s why the word “control”is used for them.
If the tires shake the linkage it will put excessive force on everything that is designed to hold it all together.
If the connections are weak it will allow excessive movement which can also be transferred back to the steering linkage.
It’s really a pretty good bit of interdependence going on.
Then throw in the fact that people replace some of the parts but not all of them and you have a pretty random assortment of component condition-
This is why vehicles feel
new when things are all new.
On top of all this sadly most people are ignoring the two most important bushings aside from the track bar and that is the upper front control arm bushings and the mount on the passenger side- I don’t know how many of these I see that have 14 new control arm bushings and the upper front or 20+ years old and when they hit a hard bump they are starting to get death wobble.
I know one good TJ technician that will not do the front end of a TJ if the owner will not let him do everything.
This is where I have a problem with absolutes because it can to an extent.
No wall of text can deny it.
Then why do we get DW with good steering dampers?
Do you really believe that weak 50:50 valve can stop it?
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