jwagner

I've got an '03 Odyssey with 75K miles. It's had a strange and somewhat intermittent low speed wheel wobble since about 40K. At 25 mph and on a straight and flat road you can watch the steering wheel oscillate back and forth. It gets faster as you speed up, and at highway speeds it's a vibration. Not severe, but definitely there.

I've been through the easy stuff. Tires balanced and checked true twice. Fronts rotated to rear. My tire guys drove it, decided it was a bent wheel and had a new one shipped to the shop. They didn't install it since all the wheels checked out straight.

I ran into a Honda mechanic at a party and he thought it was an axle. Said the Accord had a two-part axle setup that sometimes caused problems and thought my Ody did too. Anyone with experience with this? How to diagnose what's out of round?
thanks
Jim

s14civic

could be a inner cv joint but u only feel the vibration on accel

defajardo

last two customer's we had similar issues w/ ended up finding out it was a tire issue. once they replaced the tires the symptom went away

Targa250R

Definitely sounds like a bad tire(s) or possibly a bent wheel or hub to me.

I doubt it's an axle problem, as the only vibrations I've seen caused by an axle will occur only upon acceleration due to a bad inner CV joint, as mentioned above.

Have you tried another shop? While you may have a good service relationship with your current shop, the quality of work is only as good as the technician doing it. I specialized in tire mounting, wheel balancing, and alignments for several years, and I was absolutely floored by the sheer numbers of improperly balanced wheels that came through my door. Wheels with several clip-on weights clustered together, wheels with multiple clip-on weights at varying degrees on a single side of the rim, alloy wheels with weights clipped to the outer rim, sticky weights stacked on top of each other, etc.

I'd suggest calling around to find a tire shop with a Hunter GSP9700 road force balancer. You may have to pay more for the service, but the road force balancer machine can detect a number of different causes for wheel/tire-related vibrations that won't show up on a normal computerized balancer.

slowest*em1

bad tire. flat spots

jwagner

I still don't think it's a tire problem. If it were, it would probably get worse as you go faster, and it doesn't. It should have changed when tires were swapped from front to back - and this is pretty severe - the wheel actually turns back and forth at 25mph. And I totally trust the guys that do my tires - they're fanatics that do my autocross setup as well as about half the regions. They have tried to fix it twice and spent a bunch of time on it.

All that said, I did call the guy that I use for general wrenchwork. After talking for a while, he thinks it's a bent front hub, and I need to get it in so we can put it up in the air to see what wobbles when you spin the front wheels. The wobble is there whether accelerating or not, so it's probably not the inner CV.

Thanks for all the ideas, I'll let you guys know what fixes it.
Jim

djohnson2088

any new information on this problem? I have a 2011 Insight with a low speed wobble. Tires are ok, and it decreases with speed until it's almost non-existent at highway speeds.

jwagner

We replaced a wheel, which seemed OK or at least not obviously bent, aligned it, and moved the front tires to the back, and that seemed to mostly fix it. The tires were in good shape and looked fine, but seemed to either cause the problem or aggravate it, so they got replaced sooner than usual.

In short, we don't know. I think there was something bent or screwed up, but we sold the van 12k miles later.