When I got my car a year ago, it had a pronounced shimmy in the front end which was very noticeable in the steering wheel when driving on rough roads or at higher speeds.

In an effort to eliminate this, I have done the following:
Re-built front wheel bearings - Noticeable improvement - old bearings were very loose.
Replace tie-rod ends (not turbo) - again, noticeable improvement
Replaced existing KYB front struts with a good set of used KYB struts - huge improvement

Now my shimmy only seems to occur between about 65 MPH and 75 MPH, mostly on concrete roads and rough roads. Then concrete roads are probably noticeable because of the cupping inherent in heavily traveled concrete roads (i.e. 405 in SoCal).

So what do you think. At speed it feels like a significant out-of-alignment issue. Will bad ball-joints create this problem?

My thanks in advance

A wobble at those speeds is generally a tire problem. The Cap'n

I recently had the tires checked and balanced at "America's Tire" here in SoCal. Think I should take them back and ask them to have another look?

ANd what are the symptoms of a failing ball-joint? I really don't know what would indicate they are going bad...

What kind of wheels? What chassis?

Early Pedrini's will wobble on later cars at higher speeds, due to hub-centricity.

I would recheck the balancing of your tires, also they could be worn in a certain way, swap them front to rear if all are same size and see if it makes a difference if it does then it is your tires.

Ian Stott
Moncton
Canada

Stock chassis -no front sway bar. 74 2.0L. Riviera Wheels. Standard brakes.

This is an older picture, before I removed the paint from the wheel radial bars and center.
Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

those wheels are why you're having problems...

those are not hub-centric wheels, they are lug-centric.

i'm just posting what I pmed you

Thanks - I'll find a shop to "hub-centric" balance them on Friday.

Oops - I meant to say "lug-centric" balance them...

as far as i've seen, all shops have the adapter to use on their machine for lug-centric balancing...it's just convincing the shop monkeys to pull it off the side of the machine and figure it out...

"Hub centric balance"? Not a chance. "Hub centric" means the wheels center on the hub. "Lug centric" means the wheels center on the lug bores. You need the correect wheels, or you need to machine your wheels to center on the hub by means of a precision spacer ring. This can get expensive, certainly more than the wheels are worth, even new. The Cap'n

I solved this issue by finding a tire shop that had the correct lug adapter plate for the wheels.
When they throw the rivieras on a machine that just uses the center hole to mount the wheel, they never balance, in fact they are presented with a wheel that appears to be out of round, by up to 1/2 inch.

When balanced on a machine using an adapter they use the lugs to center the wheel and it balances much better.

though you will never achieve perfection, you will get damn close.
I had a super beetle that was giving me issues...it came down to how the wheels were balanced.

While back at the tire store, have them give you a full front end inspection, ball joints, tie rod ends and bearings. This should be fairly cheap, if not free for them to tell you if you have an issue.

Most tire shops do not have the correct adapter, I had to call ten stores till I found one. It was an old time shop, not the big chains that even knew what I was talking about.

Given that, the OEM fuchs are machined so well that you can balance them either way and they are spot on..I checked with my fuchs...
The rivieras are not machined to well, so you need to rely upon the lugs only...the center hole is to far off.

Good luck
Rich

WOW!!!

This sure isn't what I was expecting to hear from you guys!!!

I've been educated!

Thanks everybody.

Then there must be two styles of Riverias. The only Riv's I've personally seen were machined for the later hubs.

The early Pedrini's (pre-73) did not have that bevel and would wobble.

I was fighting a very similar issue recently and after a lot of troubleshooting it turned out to be an alignment issue. Not enough toe-in specifically.

Plenty of people will tell you that a vibration problem can't be alignment, but they'd be wrong

any word on how the mahle wheels compare? I have a full set of mahle wheels and am hoping that a hub-centric balance will work for them... will it?