Flying Jester

Hey, thought I'd relate the final moments of my one of my poor Cherokees...

I had a deathwobble from adding a lift, which I could fix at an alignment shop...if there were any alignment shops in my town, or if my town was connected to the national highway system (rural Alaska, great for jeeps in every other respect!), and also the bigger tires meant I couldn't turn very well. So I just ignored the deathwobble and added rim spacers to make it so I could turn in a timely fashion. Oh, and I'm a college student, so I bought the cheapest rim spacers. All three are big mistakes.

I was driving around midnight a week ago, all over town at about 45, ignoring the deathwobble and listening to Motörhead's Inferno (why is it always Motörhead when I do something stupid?), when all of a sudden the front end of the jeep shot down. I though I had violently punctured a tire, I've done that in street machines before, but then I saw the wheel shoot up in front of me, about ten feet high up and twenty feet ahead, the rim yellow-hot. I expected to lose control, but I kept control. Strangely, the brakes didn't work, so I ground to a halt about a thousand feet down the road. Also, very luckily, I was right by my house. So I walked back, got in one of my other cars, and drove down to look at the jeep. The rotor was gone, the joint was busted so that everything wheel-side was held on by the spindle, the bottom pivot of which was ripped off, the shock was pulled in two (new shocks, came with the lift) and the anti-sway bar was busted at both bushings and once in the middle.

I never found the rotor, but the next day me and a couple buddies looked for the tire in the woods by the road, it took us hours, but eventually we found it about a hundred feet before where all this started, on the other side of the road in a ditch. I guess it bounced off a tree. When I looked, I saw that two of the lugbolts had sheared, and the entire inside of the spacer (the cavities for nuts between the rim and the spacer) was full of aluminum shavings, presumably from having a lug shear early on, and the bad vibrations of the DW grinding at the rest of it. I can only be thankful that there was no one else on the road when it blew!

xjmarc

What kind of spacers did you run? The bolt on kind or the ones that are just a piece of metal that moves the wheel out. The latter requires longer lugs or the wheel tends to work it's way off. I ran the bolt on kind for about 5 years and never had an issue and I know lots of other that still run them.

_StationWagon_

That's why wheels spacers wouldn't have passed inspection in Jersey. But that was then. Welcome to the new NJ where morons with unsafe vehicles will be behind the wheel, endangering themselves (who cares) and everyone ele on the roads.

Dude, not calling you a moron, but you could have killed someone by being oblivious and careless. And that's all I've got to say about that.

Tankerblade

Honestly, how could he have known something like that was going to happen?? Would you have known about it unless you took your tires off every 100 miles? No one can predict an accident. Thankfully it was when no one was around, no need to dog him. Jersey and Alaska are two completely different places, you cant compare apples to oranges... The west is way, way, way, WAY different then the east....

(*~*)lost

Glad to hear your ok, bet that was a pucker factor of 10.

alfreado121

scary accident to be in glad you didnt flip and go rolling down the road!!
i have to say its never a good thing to see your wheels and tires pass you on a drive!!

so when are you going to get the xj back on the road???

_StationWagon_

no, no, no ... def not trying to dog him. But re-read his post: He had death wobble & he "ignored" it. Then he compounds the error by adding wheel spacers. Just IMO, but that was a mistake because since you don't know what's causing the DW, you don't want to accidentally make things worse by adding an unknown quantity to a vulnerable location. The guy found out (admits in retrospect) that he made mistakes, and that's good ...
Of course he couldn't have known what would happen ... if we all could there would be no such things as accidents. But we all wanna be more responsive to the warning signs. DW is a warning sign that something is wrong. Running 3500+ pounds of steel & rubber at 45 with a known control issue is asking for trouble. And no amount of bashing will make me change this opinion. When mine had the curse I literally crawled it to the shop - flashers & all - with a friend following. I try not to push my luck (except on the trails ).

The comparison between Jersey & Alaska is irrelevant. I'm sure people die in both places. I'm glad he didn't.

RkyMtnH

X 2 . Ignoring the issue(DW) only makes it worse.

whatevah

Just for future note, you can do an alignment in your driveway. http://www.quadratec.com/jeep_knowle...article-48.htm

clayton3854

he new he had DW yes but i doubt he did nor did i and idk if anyone else new that wheel spacers with DW make the DW worse. i dont think he nor anyone else on here could have predicted any of that to happen. yes ppl would have told him to do something about it but chances are if he asked what happens if i dont no1 would say your gonna get in a huge accident. prolly just tell him hes gonna break a few parts. no need to dog him for any of that. accidents happen why there called accidents

rich

Thats why you use loctite on wheel spacers they do loosen up cause they are aluiminium and need to be re-torqed all the time.They aren't a run and forget item.

_StationWagon_

Had he asked that question & I responded, I would have said "I wouldn't risk it dude - you never know what might happen. Then again, it might be okay. But I wouldn't."

But you should err on the side of caution. C'mon man, common sense! You have a problem where your wheels hop all over the place & the Jeep dances on the road, scaring the **** out of grown men - and you would add little wheel thingies before fixing that problem? Seriously?

When I had DW nothing else mattered on the XJ. I skimped on food & spent hundreds until it was fixed.

But that's just me. Call me paranoid. But I kind of enjoy having 4 bits of rubber under the heep. And yes, I have (nearly) experienced the loss of a wheel, rolling on 1 lug nut. It wasn't at all funny, tho unforeseen & no fault of mine.

But heck, I talk too much ... carry on boys.

Donnie_K

I think it was more than just misalignment causing your death wobble... I'm willing to bed there were some bad ball joints or a trackbar bushing or something. The extra forces from that combined with the extra leverage from the wheel spacers did that wheel in.

Glad you're ok man, and I hope everyone can learn something from this.

Flying Jester

No, the bushings and joints were beautiful. It was the lift, it messed with my steering geometry, and I got it as good as a guy in a dirt-floor shop with a tape measure and a borrowed monkey wrench can get it. It was smooth (although you could sense some sort of bad vibe) until about 50, then it started shimmying something fierce. And plus, it started the exact moment I put the lift on. There's no way this would've happened if not for the bad alignment, and that's directly the product of a lift and "fairly good" alignment. I figured that as long as I didn't go up to cause the major shimmy, I'd be fine. I can tell you now, that's 100% wrong, because occasionally it would start at about 20, I'd stop, and then accelerate again, and it usually went away. Or, sometimes I'd accelerate "through" it, which worked at that moment. Again, a huge mistake.

The spacers were aluminum, the kind that have a second set of lugs in between the normal ones. I did use loctite, and torqued them as hard as (once again) a guy with a dirt-floor garage using a bent tire iron can get them. I imagine one or two of the lugs on the jeep (three sheared in the end) were in bad shape (but not sheared yet), and I didn't notice. The other side is still as tight as possible.
Not to say a missing lug is the end of the world, my 91 Toyota 6-lug is missing two adjacent lugs on one front wheel, and one on the other side tire, and it's still rolling. But it has factory alignment and no spacers.

As far as AK vs NJ, there are people on the sidewalk at midnight in residential areas in NJ...hell, you actually have sidewalks...hell and tarnation, in AK "residential area" means you have a house every half-mile. It means no one was there to get hurt by a tire rocketing off, it means I could scrape to a halt, and no one was in the way, and if I had lost control, I would only have hurt myself.

Donnie_K

Sorry man, a 3" lift simply does not change your geometry that much. I'm running a 4.5" on stock steering (for 2 more weeks) and have no death wobble. My alignment has been off since I installed the lift last winter. If things are tight, and a wheel is held at an off angle, it will stay on that off angle, not wobble back and forth between it and some other angle. If it's moving, it's worn.