Well it turns out I'm not as clever as I thought. I've had a vibration when driving since I bought the car. Would come and go, but on the highway it can get annoying...never felt like it was dangerous. Winter wheels on its nice and smooth. Recently got a new set of tires, examined my 4 Asteroids and found one has a very slight deflection on the inside rim of the wheel...its not cracked, kinked or even badly bent...just a spot thats not as round as the rest of the wheel. Since my spare was from 2004 I figured ok, well I need to get 5 tires anyway, so for now I'll get 4 and I'll swap the spare wheel in for the bad one and solve my problem. Hooray I am so smart!

So...yeah, I probably should have examined the spare more closely, its also got a ding in it, a bit worse than the other one, but the tire shop followed my instructions and slapped the tire on there anyway and now I've got a pretty good vibration going on. I took them off thinking they just didn't balance them (I still don't think they did...one wheel has a ton of brake dust on the inside and there are no clean spots where the wheel weight is...two wheels have three of the adhesive square weights near the spokes and two have rim weights on the inside of the rin and those two weights are very different styles.

I put the snows back on and now I'm back to a nice smooth ride, but I'd like to try to sort these wheels out. Found a couple local shops that do repairs but they will only do full refurbs to include straightening, rounding, stripping, ainting, removing curb marks, etc...the lower cost place is $200 per wheel so I don't see going down this route at the moment.

Has anyone ever successfully corrected a slight out of round in an asteroid before? Or maybe I just put the tire back on the one with the very slight bend and see if the newer, thicker rubber isolated it better? Thoughts?

 

I had the "reverse" issue... My Asteroids with the summer Continentals are fine (not perfect but perfectly fine). The Penta's I picked up last year for winter tires (Michelin X-Ice) were also not perfect cosmetically but were perfectly fine. The local/independent tire shop I've been patronizing for 20 plus years checked the Penta's before mounting anything to them to see if they were true/round and sure enough two of them were perfectly fine and two of them were not quite perfectly fine but the shop still considered them to be acceptable. We marked those for the year where it's slightly less problematic for, mounted and balanced the new tires and they've been absolutely fine.

I don't think the wheels can be assessed with the tires mounted so you might have to find a shop prepared to unmount the tires and then have them check the wheels to see how true they are or aren't. I also wouldn't assume that it's the ones with a bit of visual damage or inconsistency that are the worst as it might be one or more of the others that are out of true as opposed to out of round. It's pretty obvious when they're being spun if they're out of true as they'll visually "wobble".

 

For Mayhem: look around for another wheel shop. The quoted price is high . . . shopping may come up with a better deal.

Tire shops always complain (insurance issues, yada yada), but I insist on watching the wheels spin up with these new high speed balancers -- if the wheel (or tire) is untrue, as Ken noted, the wobble is pretty obvious.

 

Thanks guys!

The two shops I spoke to both have simialr pricing...the one basically does one wheel full restoration for $200, or offers the special pricing of a full set for $800! They will do just a re-rounding (or whatever the correct term is) for $150...clearly priced to get you to go for the whole restoration.

I'll hit the tire store tomorrow for the rebalance and maybe transfer the tire back to the original wheel as it has significantly less of a deflection.

 

A good balancing and the vibration is almost non-existent. Not as smooth as the snow tires, but not as bad as it was only old summer tires...livable, but I'll keep looking for a wheel shop to correct the flaws for a more palatable price.