i thought it was my alignment so i aligned it today and no help, vibrates in the steering wheel, and console, any siggestions what could be wrong, do i need to rebuild my front end? spohn sells a kit, i might be able to get it cheaper though work. also my steering wheel is feeling harder and harder to turn, comapred to different cars i work on, does this mean my power steering pump is going.

 

Your vibration problems could be caused by a lot of things but if your suspension looks good then its probably the tires or driveshaft. I would look at getting the tires rebalanced first. If you have cheap off brand tires sometimes they never seem to balance well. It helps having weights put on both outside and inside of the rim if you can live with the look of having weights on the outside. I know I'll never buy another set of cheap tires because of these problems, I learned my lesson and will always try to stick with name brand tires. Thirdgens are well known for having driveshafts that are out of balance so thats another thing you can look at. My factory driveshaft was way out of balance.

 

can i get my driveshaft balenced somewhere or should i just replace it?

 

This is a big topic over in the tranny/drivetrain forum...search a bit over there also. I had the same problem in my RS...bad vibrations especially up around 70-85 MPH.

First thing I recommend: Get a 4th gen aluminum dirveshaft, preferably a big one from a LS1 car. This cured my problem.

Then also check into the tires, wheels, etc.

HTH...Ed

 

can i jack up my rear and take it up to 60 and see if it vibrates, will that work?

 

I've worked on quite a few vibration problems, and the first thing is to focus on a specific vibration- there are lots of them in an F-Body, so you need to focus in - at a certain speed and location- IE- the steering wheel vibrates at 60 mph. Find the speed it vibrates the worst at and then make changes to fix it, focusing on that speed & rpm. For example, if it is a tire balance problem, the vibration will tend to get worse the faster you go. A tire/wheel can also have what is called a "couple imbalance". That means it will cause a lateral shake, and can be felt in the steering wheel. Try switching the right and left tires and front and rear (if possible) to find the worst tire. Usually by putting the worst tire on the left front, you will feel more vibration. Take it to be balanced on a really good spin balancer that has been recently calibrated (usually the wheel will have weights both inside and outside after this). Also, if the vibration is present at say 55 mph, but goes away at 65 mph, it points to a tire being out of round (called bad uniformity). There's no fix to this other than getting new tires, but if you put the worst tire on the back of the car, sometimes you will feel the vibration less. Anyway, that's just the tires, it can be a lot of different things. By the way, one of the worst things I ever did was put on a urethane rear trans mount (I think it was from Energy Suspension) in my 89 350 5-speed car- switching back to the old style rubber mount drastically reduced road vibration in my car.

 

funny u say that, i kept braking trans mounts so i put in a poly one, cant remember if the vibrations stated before of after that, maybe before, im going to check the driveshaft, front suspension, and maybe swap in another mount wednsday, and maybe ill spin the tires on a balencer see whats up. if it turns out to be the mount, and i kept breaking stock rubber ones, what can i do?

 

I don't know what the answer is for the rear trans mount, but I'll bet somebody on this web site does. I am worried about breaking mine also, I drive the car every day, so I have been babying it. The torque arm puts a tremendous load through that rear mount. I know that there are aftermarket torque arms that have custom made replacement cross members so that the torque arm mounts directly to the crossmember, not the transmission. This will probably create some noise problems also, but it would cure the trans mount problem. I'd like to try one of them (I think Spohn sells one), but I just can't afford it right now. Good luck with your problem.