tires

I bought my 2015 Toyota Tundra SR5 TRD Offroad 4x4 new. I have had an intermittent front end shake since new. Almost feels like the right front is jumping or bouncing. This is usually prevalent when the truck is cold in the morning. First few miles. I have had passengers tell me they could feel it shaking since. Apparently, it does this all the time, I just don't notice it after the first few miles as the driver. Despite regular dealership Maint. the problem has persisted. I had to have had 2 tires replaced @ less than 30,000 because they became out of round under warranty. At about 40,000 and no improvement, I changed all 4 to Nito A/T Terra Grappler G2 @ the dealership. I still had all the same issues despite regular maint. Now, @ 85,000, I have another out of round tire. Keep in mind. None of my tires have ever survived past half tread life on this truck. If you don't rotate and balance regularly the truck chews the leading edge off the lugs fairly quickly. WTF is wrong with this truck? I have owned almost every make and model of truck with GM being by far the worse on tires....this one is almost as bad. Any ideas?

 

My guess is that your bad tires may have weakened the front shocks.
I would install new front shocks and a set of 4 matching Michelins.

 

alignment!

 

All the obvious tire and alignment stuff has been done many times over. This truck has a problem and I am very tired of having to replace half life tires.

 

Have you considered just selling the truck?

 

The only "problem" a mechanical rotating design can have that will decrease the life of "every"(meaning eliminate the tires since multiple sets are in play)" tire installed on the hub is either they are not aligned properly, the wheels you are using are not true (perfectly round), or the tires are not getting balanced correctly and I assume (hope) you have already used multiple balancing shops. A suspension component bad would already have failed if is was causing this, and a bad dampener (shock) should be pretty obvious as you hit bumps in the road it would feel like the wheels are rattling. IF they are aftermarket wheels then I would go back to factory and that will eliminate those as an issue. If you are running E rated tires then get your tire pressures up to 40 minimum and don't use the door sticker that was designed for C/D rated tires. Further with uneven tread wear, I would execute the chalk test on a nice flat parking lot area and get your tire pressures perfect for the truck with the tires you have installed. Keep covering tread with kids chalk in a spot across the entire contact patch, and adjust pressure starting at 50 down in 2 pound increments until when you move truck forward and backward 100ft it wears the chalk off evenly across the tread showing full contact.

 

tks for the ideas. Its a stock truck. Only the Nittos are different. I Keep my trucks for a decade or more so I consider this to be an investment. I can't afford to just buy a new vehicle as they are north of $50000.00 now. This is the only really bothersome issue I have had with it.

 

if I were you, I would for sure set the pressures to exact contact patch method and then using that tire pressure I would find a place that has the Hunter high end balancing machine and have them balance the tires. Sounds like you keep going to the dealer, and they tend to be the worst with balancing tires because they normally have a min wage trainee doing tires and wheels and they are just trying to get it done as fast as possible. It really does sound like a balancing issue to me, or a bad tire and only way to know that is to have it balanced perfect and then drive it. I found my two bad tires by moving them around on the truck and having them balanced again and again. I found the two that were causing the shake and when placed on the balance machine after they spun up true which leans toward a bad belt in the tire.

The out of round thing I'm not familiar with on tires that have 1/2 life worn off them. I'm not sure how you can get a tire "out of round" driving down the road at highway speeds.

I would jack up the truck and use a stand of some type with a small object attached, I used a mini camera stand with a scribe taped to it and placed it so it was just touching the outer lip of the rim and then rotated the wheel slowly to check that it was true on both the planes. This will tell you if the wheel is true as it mounts to the hub.

 

Find a different alignment shop. Tundras are picky with alignment specs and “in spec” won’t always eliminate tire wear issues. Though 40k out of a set of Terra Grapplers isn’t bad, I believe those are rated for 50k. You could try Ridge Grapplers, I have 30k on mine and a ton of tread left.

 

TKS guys, I will do some of these things this weekend. I would say I could easily get another 20,000 miles out of these tread wise.