I'm back with an update.

About a year ago my 2002 TL/S hit the mother of all potholes in I-84 in Cheshire CT. I won't go into all of the details, but ever since then the car had a nasty vibration problem at 65-75mph. Wasn't really bad, but more than noticable and it made the pain to drive.

Alignments and balances did nothing, new wheels (two sets), new tires (three sets), new front axle (under warranty), nothing. Dealer gave up, TireRack authorized shop was perplexed.

Two months ago I was putting my summer wheels on the car when I noticed something. The weights on the driver side wheel with on the edge of the rim, the weights on the passenger side were towards the middle.

On a hunch, I brought to car to the dealer and asked him to remove *all* of the weights and to start over on all four wheels. Got the car back - AMAZING. Not a hint of vibration for the first time in a year! Got home, put the winter wheels back, back to the dealer. Same deal. NO VIBRATION!

Here is my best guess at what happened:

When I had the first vibration problem, the dealer's tech tried to balance the wheels using an older machine that placed weights only on the rim. He mentioned he had trouble doing this on "custom wheels."

When I still had a problem, I brought it to TireRack installer who took each wheel off... but if a wheel balanced fine on his machine, he popped it back on the car. If it didn't, he used his newer machine which placed weights towards the middle of the car.

End result, both wheels would balance perfectly on the machine, BUT ONCE ON THE CAR, the weight locations were now mixed on each side of the car - which may have caused the vibration problem.

When I brought the car to the dealer this time, he had a new machine which used newer style weights. He must have chipped off all of the old weights, and started each wheel from scratch - problem solved, each wheel balanced the same way.

Again, this is my best guess at what happened, and not surprisingly the problem was also resolved on my winter wheels when they also chipped all the weights off on them and started over.

If you're having a vibration problem - try this!

The kicker is that a good mechanic will always dump all existing weights....

 

I don't understand. If the wheels were all balanced I don't see why the placement of the weights would affect them.

 

Just curious, Were these rim lip weights or stick on inside of the flat weights?

 

were you having your custom rims (not stock rims) balanced with the rim weights that you can see from looking at the rim?