What is your procedure for reinstalling wheels?

I guess I'll preface by saying that this is my first vehicle with hub centric, aluminum wheels. That being said, do these things have a lifespan? Are the center bores expected to wear out and need replacing?

What prompted this is that I had my tires rotated & balanced Friday afternoon. This was my first time having that done since I did rack bushings and new rotors a while back. Holy crap, this thing drove like my wife's BMW. Literally the best that it has ever driven. Sunday morning I pull the front tires and do a little more front end work. Get in the truck to drive to work today and I have a tire so far out of balance I had to get off the highway and take residential roads because I was afraid I was gonna lose a wheel. Got to work, found a torque wrench and everything spec'd out. Baby it home this evening and I just now got my wheels back on after trying to figure this out.

If I hang my wheel on the center hub, I can get a 0.010 feeler gauge in the bottom and absolutely nothing in the top. With lugs no more than hand tight, if I rotate it 180 I get the same. So clearly, on each front wheel, if I let gravity do the work, I have each wheel 0.010" out of round when I tighten everything up.

This couldn't have possibly caused my death wobble today right? I mean there is no way the wheels can be held to those tolerances right? How did the shop mount them to where they were dead perfect in round?

As bad as I want some new Speed Sixes, its simply not in the budget right now.

 

I've never given it any thought. Stick them on, tighten the lugs in a crisscross pattern. Mission accomplished. A hundredth of an inch is nothing on a wheel that size. I'd guess you lost a weight or something.

 

Either a weight or you have the wrong type of lug nuts. There are a couple different styles and having the wrong one might cause issues.

 

What front end work did you do?

 

The lug nuts have a taper on them, and the wheels have a opposing taper, so the wheel self-centers when you tighten the nuts. As mentioned above by @Aerindel; you're tightening in a criss-cross pattern, right?

 

The mag style nuts don't. They have a taper to locate but have a flat mounting surface. If the wrong type was every used the holes could be egged out a little.

Using the acorn nuts on those wheels could cause the issue, they also have a short version of the mag style that won't clamp the wheel wheel enough before bottoming out on the lug.

 

I seriously believe these are the factory lugs and I know they aren’t the wrong shank depth. They look similar to these.

I can hang the wheel/tire and spin them while looking at the distance between it and the ground and I can see it change in several spots. My eyes may not be a runout gauge but I would estimate it’s between 1/16 and 1/8 change. I can see this happen on both the fronts and I notice that when the gap is the largest, that’s where the majority of weights are on the wheel.

I guess what I’m asking is what should the tolerance be between the wheel and the hub? Because it’s clear that mine has enough of a gap that it changes where the whole wheel centers.

 

This is lug centric wheels. Hub centric wheels use a lug nut that looks like post #7.

 

So what I ended up doing last night was hanging the wheel, all lugs loose, on the hub, holding the wheel with my feet and getting it centered to where I could get a feeler in at 12,3,6,9:00 and then snugging up 2 lugs.

Then I spun the wheel and noted the position where it was closest to the ground. I then rotated to where that position is at 12:00, loosened the lugs and then torqued everything up. My thought process being that I let the tolerance difference make up for what is possibly an out of round tire.

I’ll report back on the ride this evening.

My thought is that the wheel should not be able to move this much on the hub and over X amount of rotations and lazy tire monkeys, the center wheel bore has been chipped away at it looks like I’ll be living with some vibration until I nut up for new wheels.

 

A hub centric wheel can be placed on the hub then tightened down. I always use a star pattern just to make sure it is flush against the hub, but you don’t need to think about it otherwise. The tight hub fit centers the wheel for you, beautiful thing

 

You're seeing this runout at the tire, correct? Can you make shade-tree runout gauge by placing something close to the wheel edge to see if the variation is also present at the wheel? That would isolate the problem to the tire -- or not.

 

With the truck in the air I hand tighten the nuts and rotate the tire while I add new ones. Then I start making passes with a wrench, cross cross one at a time until kinda snug, pushing the tire towards the frame by hand while tightening. Then I get the wheel chock or a 4x4 block and wedge it under the tread so the tire can't spin and I torque them all to 83ftlbs criss cross style.

If you put any weight on the tire while putting nuts on it will go off balance in my experience, learned this the hard way long ago.

 

Solid idea. Ill give this a shot this evening.

Backstory on the tires themselves, I bought them in Dec 15. At this time I had a company truck and between then and Mar 18 I put less than 6k on them. I left that job and started using the Tundra as my daily. Over those 28 months of barely driving the Tundra I would notice the vibration but since I never spent much time in it, I never really pressed to get the issue fixed. Fast forward to me driving it daily now and beginning Mar 18 it feels like Ive had it at Discount Tire at least every three months asking them to figure it out. Mar 19 I go in and realize that Ive been fighting this for a year and get a little hasty asking them to either fix them or replace them. Well low and behold, the replacement certificates expired in Dec 18 and they tell me they cant do crap other than trade them in at $40/tire for something else. Mind you these tires still have 15/32 and look brand new. I escalated it a little and ended up getting two replaced.

Point being, I'm gonna feel like a dick if I determine its been my wheels the whole time.

 

Conclusion, after 2 hours, tons of measurements and one smashed finger, I believe I have it all figured out. Well, at least on the driver side.

So I placed my wheel on the hub and used washers between the wheel and lug to ensure the shank wasn't causing the wheel to off center. I used a 0.0015"! feeler all around the hub to ensure that my wheel was dead centered. Using a makeshift little runout gauge it was determined that the wheel is dead true. Which makes sense due to the feeler gauge. I then used my jack to get the tire as close as possible to the ground without touching it. By placing a flashlight on the opposite side of the tire I was able to locate, what I felt was a pretty massive low spot (closer to the hub) on the tire. I'm talking between 1/16" to 1/8" at its worst. In the picture, the L's mark the beginning of the low spot with the lowest occurring in the middle between the two.

I then rotated the wheel to where the low spot was at 6:00 and let gravity take out any of the slack between the wheel and hub and put on any lugs that I could completely tighten without wheel movement and torqued them. Then I chocked the wheel and put on any of the other lugs that required a little bit of effort to turn. When spinning the wheel again, this seems to have helped to offset the low spot but not eliminate it. I still have a bit of a shimmy this morning but its nowhere near as bad as it was.

Personally, I feel that this much radial runout is not acceptable but I doubt that pressing the issue even more with Discount is going to get me anywhere.

 

What kind of tires, difficulty balancing like KO2’s sometimes?

I rotate myself and honestly never had to apply anything special other than star pattern. But I do like Darkness’ method and will go forth with that.

 

Cooper ATP E range.