Steering Wheel Shake / Tire Wear on 06' Pete 387
 

I've been having an issue with irregular tire wear and mild steering wheel shake. The right steer is wearing on the inside shoulder in a few random places after only 20k miles. The shaking isn't dependant on speed and the issue isn't balancing (I run Centramatics and Tru-balance wheel centering sleeves) and it is somewhat intermittent. It seems that it's worse when I begin driving and then after a half hour or so it diminishes, although sometimes it sporadically returns. Also, when the steering wheel shakes, it seems to vibrate the right fender / hood area as I can see the hood mounted mirror shake when it's at its worst. Alignment was done at a competent shop and then checked and validated by another reputable place a few thousand miles later. The problem isn't shocks, as I run Road King shocks on all three axles. The truck has 910k miles and is on all original parts. I had thought that it might be kingpins, but the local Cummins dealer checked and said they thought everything looked okay. Anyone wanna take a wild guess on this? Could it be bearings? Steering components are one of my weakest areas as far as mechanical issues go, so any advice is welcome. I do know that with 910k miles on all original parts that everything could be on the verge of going out. Anybody competent enough to do the work is welcome to come stay in our guest room and do the work for $30 / hour cash and I'll supply the parts, beer, food and go-fer help, and we can rebuild the whole front end. Oh, and if you like to hunt, our county is known as some of the best deer hunting anywhere. See pic of my back property below ======>

http://i1082.photobucket.com/albums/...ps9dd61a08.jpg

have had that problem and tyre service put wheel back on balancer and found tyre was slightly out of shape ,they spun it and you could see out of round [when it spun they held tyre lever near tread and there be good 1/4 inch difference ]new tyre and no problems.that was after wheel alignment was done first

Yeah, i'd have to agree with that, sounds like a defective tire.

So far I've had four or five tires in that position, results are always the same, although the Bridgestones wore a little worse than my Yokohama's that I normally run.

i have the same exact problem. its getting really annoying to say the least. ate up my toyo m147's with in 40k. currently eating up my chinese tires (kinda happy because i hate them) now. i'm getting an alignment and new shocks to see if that does it. though, at 45 the wheel has a nasty shake.

Well, it's rules out the tire on 99.9%. I know you've said about Road kings, but still could be a problem, and i'd check wheel bearings too.

It is definitely annoying. I do my own tire work and I run 10 all-position Yokohama 16 Ply RY023's (and I love them, btw... I highly recommend), so I just rotate them out. I only leave steers on for 50k or so anyway and then set them aside to become drive tires when the need arises. About the time I have six used steers and a set getting ready to come off, my drives are about ready to be replaced. It works out real well and I always have a nice new set of steers up front. What I've been doing to compensate for the abnormal wear is dismount and flip the right steer when it starts to show wear (usually about 20k is seems these days), then when it starts wearing again on the inside, I remove it, bring the left steer over to the right side and put a new steer on the left side. It's extra work, but I'm pretty quick at tire changing and can do two in about 30 minutes.

I wasn't sure until recently whether or not I was going to keep this truck much longer and so didn't want to dump money into it, but I'm fairly certain I'm going to in-frame it when the time comes (910k and the oil samples look as good as the day I bought it with 172k on it). Now that I'm sure I'm keeping it, I'd like to fix the problem, but I don't want to pay $100 an hour to have stuff replaced that doesn't need replacing, and we all know that's what will most likely happen if I take it to Peterbilt or Cummins. I'm thinking about having the whole front end rebuilt if I can find a competent mechanic who wants to do it in my shop for cash. Also, there's a guy who has a repair shop in Vandalia, IL who also runs his own small fleet of grain trucks who seems very good (seems honest anyway) and only charges $60 an hour. I might give him a call, but he's 100 miles away from me.

Worst case scenario, I can just keep dealing with the problem until it gets worse and can be easily diagnosed.

I've thought about pulling the shocks off and putting stock ones on for one trip out to see if that makes a difference. The Road Kings do have some miles on them and could have gone bad, but my last set were still good after 600k miles. I may try shocks when I get home, since they are so cheap and easy to replace. I know bearings are easy to replace, but I've never done them. The shop across the street from my house will do them and charge $80 an hour. They're mostly an automotive place, but are good with truck alignments and are do a fair amount of truck "parts swapping" as I call it. Their response when I asked about kingpins was, "Well, it's been awhile since we've done any." That's all I needed to hear on that subject. It's gonna be a lot longer before they ever do mine.

Had the exact same problem on my 2006 379 a couple of years back. Every shop that checked it out said everything was fine and they were as baffled as I was. I changed tires (including brands), shocks, had alignments....nothing helped. Finally decided enough was enough and had yet another Peterbilt shop take a look. Turned out IT WAS the King Pin on the right side, had both changed and problem went away :D

Looking to this topic was meaningless for me... but I am enjoying being here.

Well, I had the truck realigned again. It was within factory spec, but the drive axles were thrusting against each other. I know some techs do that on purpose, but my local shop thinks that could have been causing the from end to shimmy back and forth. I'm not so sure that was the problem, but time will tell, I guess. I still have the steering wheel shake. I put 6k miles on the new alignment so far. The tires are certainly wearing differently, but I don't know if they are wearing properly. The ridge formed at the edge of the old uneven wear has smoothed out some. I'll probably run the tires a little longer before I pull them off and set them aside for future drive tire use.

I'm pretty sure I've decided to keep the truck for a few more years, especially since it's paid off, so I'm probably going to have all new steering components (at least kingpins, tie rod ends and bearings) put in sometime in the near future. Had I not just spent $4k on a tow bill and new clutch, I'd probably be doing the from end a little sooner.

As a side note, while I was sitting in the KW dealer in Knoxville (who treated me VERY well and did a great job, by the way) getting my new clutch installed, I spent the day in the drivers' lounge talking to a Canadian leased o/o who went out and spec'd a $189k truck that had been down 33 days for repairs out of the first three months he'd owned it. That made me very glad to be repairing my 916k mile, paid for truck (with lifetime 6 cpm maintenance cost for truck, trailer, APU and tires).

Maybe not the tire but the wheel. If you haven't actually checked for an out-of-round condition on the wheel/tire assembly but are just going by the fact that the problem has persisted through several different tires, you've only ruled out the tire (most likely) but not the whole assembly, which includes the wheel. An out-of-round or bent wheel would distort the tire causing the same symptom as on OOR tire. Might be worth looking at.

The wheels that are on the steers now actually come from the right front drive position about 10 months ago. I noticed irregular wear on the steers after being on the road for a couple weeks and didn’t plan on being home for two or three more, so I had the TA in Moriarty, NM swap the wheels to save the tires as much as possible without paying the $200 it’d have cost to have them dismount and remount the tires. I don’t have a “radial runout” setup with dial indicators, but I do always look closely at all my rims when I have the tires off. Today in fact, I replaced my steers and rear axle drives, and I took a pretty close look at them then. One somewhat reliable way of checking the rims is to roll them slowly across a clean and smooth concrete floor and watch for irregularities in the rim. Also, if the rim rolls in a perfectly straight line, there’s a pretty good chance that it is pretty close to round. Nothing beats a set of dial indicators, but I haven’t got that technology yet.

If you've swapped wheels during the time the problem was occurring, I guess that's not the problem. I hate front end issues!

Ever figure it out? I'm fighting the steering wheel shake with my '06 387. Put brand new rims and tires on 10,000 miles ago and the shake is back. Centramatics make no difference at all.

A local shop tried adjusting the thrust (alignment of the drive axles). They were adjusted so that one axle was thrusting slightly to one side and the second axle was thrusting slightly the other way. It wasn't enough to cause any irregular wear on the drives, but caused enough shimmy back and forth to be felt in the steering wheel. The shake is gone, but I'm still having the steer tire wear problem. My local Cummins shop said everything looked okay to them, the mom & pop place near my house that does alignments said everything looked good to them as well, but clearly something somewhere is wrong. With close to a million miles on all original steering components, it could be just about anything. I'm fed up with it though and am thinking about replacing kingpins, tie rod ends and bearings. If that doesn't solve the problem, I don't know what will. I dropped it of at Peterbilt today to see if they could do more than just take my money like they often do. I'll know in a couple days.

So I finally got tired of the problem enough that I took the truck to Peterbilt (Sauget, IL). They found what I had already suspected that the steering gearbox was badly worn (we replaced that) and they shimmed the steering axle spring hanger bushings (probably doesn't affect the actual steering or tire wear issue, but I didn't know they could be shimmed). I've only put 8k miles on the truck since I picked it up, but it drives like a completely different vehicle now. I have less vibration in the front end (this is obvious by the reduced vibration that is visible in the fender mounted blind spot mirror) and it I can take my hands off the wheel and it will track straight for as much as a mile. I'm really hoping that this has solved the wear problem, but I wont know until the end of November. By then I'll have about 25k on the truck, post repair and would have seen some tire shoulder wear by that point before the repair.

Well shoot. I've replaced my spring bushings and mounts, replaced the steering box too. Still have my shake, still runs tires perfectly for 80,000 miles and then just starts wiping them out within a couple of weeks. Its always been that way, always. The shake has just been in the last year though.

I was way way way down south in Illinois Friday. About as way far south as you can get.

Well you were probably near my house. I'm about 45 miles north of Paducah.

After replacing the steering box and having the spring hangers shimmed (yes, I know the spring hangers have little or nothing to do with my problem), the tire wear has gotten better. The shake is gone, but the wear is still showing up around the 25k mile point, but it's now only on the left steer outside shoulder and nowhere near as bad as it was. My APU took a dump on me and I'm buying a new TriPac Evolution, but as soon as I recover from that and the holidays, I plan on going ahead and replacing the bearings, tie rod ends and kingpins. They've got a million miles on them, so I figure it's time. I bet that solves my problem.

Well you were probably near my house. I'm about 45 miles north of Paducah.

After replacing the steering box and having the spring hangers shimmed (yes, I know the spring hangers have little or nothing to do with my problem), the tire wear has gotten better. The shake is gone, but the wear is still showing up around the 25k mile point, but it's now only on the left steer outside shoulder and nowhere near as bad as it was. My APU took a dump on me and I'm buying a new TriPac Evolution, but as soon as I recover from that and the holidays, I plan on going ahead and replacing the bearings, tie rod ends and kingpins. They've got a million miles on them, so I figure it's time. I bet that solves my problem.

Hello Sir
I can almost guarantee you that your problem is , you need kingpin bushings or shims. I had a tractor that did exactly the same way. Find a good tractor front end shop and tell them what its doing and if they say no tell them you want it any way.

I am speaking from experience on my 07 Freightliner Century. But some of this is just general knowledge too. Some of this information is also since this is a public forum, other operators with different types of equipment might be seeking answers for stuff too.


Anyway....

I bought my truck in July 2012, in Aug 12, I had to put kingpins in. It would scrub tires off in about 7000 miles. It was checked by 3 mechanics before I bought it to verify the kingpins were good/bad. The dealers mechanic, a 3rd party mechanic out in Wash and my own mechanic back home as well as myself. After 3 weeks of driving the truck, I noticed a wear on the right steer, I had a driveline vibration and a pull all at the same time. I bought the truck with 708,000 miles on it. It came from Pride Transportation originally, then a company out of, I want to say Medford OR, that went bankrupt. They had mainly yellow trucks. Hauling produce in WA, OR and CA primarily.

If you have 1/2" of freeplay in your tire, you have MAJOR issues. To the one that recommended that, WOW. Where does that come from? If you have discernible movement in the front, you have issues. On my Airtek (air-ride) axle, that is measured with a dial indicator of like 0.010" or less is spec.

Hendrickson and all the manufacturer's put their component literature online for people to download. Just a matter of finding them.
http://www.hendrickson-intl.com/Part...uck-Literature

The other thing I found out for my "pull" and vibration was that I had an incorrect ride height. It was a good 1 3/4" off. We correct that.

I had a 3-axle alignment done as well to find out that I had one axle pushing to the center 3/16" and towards the ditch at 1/8". I forget where they corrected it to, but it changed the truck dramatically.

We installed Dunlop SP384 tires on the same time we did the kingpins and 3-axle. Within about 20,000 miles, I noticed the right side wearing funny. Feathering like it was off on toe. We checked it and rotated left to right and it was still there. At 48,000 miles, it was so bad, I had to replace what was now the right steer tire. At this time, I had swapped my dry van for a reefer and knew I'd have this trailer for a while. I did a 5-axle alignment as well. I changed the tracking on the trailer by about 4". I could have the steers/drives on the left of the center line and it looked to have entire centerline plus a bit more to the edge of the trailers. It was done under "warranty".

I ran those tires another 45,000 miles and finally had to replace the right side tire again due to wear issues.

This time, we replaced them with Goodyear G399LHS tires. In about 7000 miles, I noticed feathering on the right side steer. A third 3-axle alignment was done. We also noticed at this time a major lean in the cab on my truck. It turned out that Hendrickson has a dual height control valve conversion for their Airtek axles in mid-late 2009. I only had a right side HCV and they added the left side to it. Freightliner wanted $300+ for the kit plus labor to install. I called and talked to Hendrickson about it and they shipped me the HCV and bracket for free. I had to purchase $30 worth of bolts and air line + fittings to complete the conversion. It too me about 30 minutes to cut two huck-bolts and install the bracket and HCV.

That link above? It also has links to the literature to order (for free) the height gage for the Airtek front axles. It makes it really easy now to take 20 seconds on my walk around to check my front axle over to include my ride height.

After this last go around, I have now gotten about 30,000+ miles on the tires and they are wearing normal finally. I can actually take my hands off the wheel if I want to and it just goes down the road if there's no cross-wind etc. It takes little effort to drive this truck really.

I've been chasing the same problem with my '06 387 for over 3 years. Last week, I finally found it. My left front hub was bent just very slightly. It had .035" lateral runout. Replaced it for $235 and my steering wheel wobble, tire shake and all is gone. Had this thing to every shop I could find trying to get this problem fixed. All said tires, alignment, kingpins. It was none of the above. You'll never see it just spinning the wheel. Takes a dial indicator.