Hi All,

Bit of a newcomer here, I've had my 1996 XJ Sport for a couple of months now and I've noticed an issue it seems to have with highway driving and general turning.

When driving around 90+ km/h (Aussie poster here ) it gets slight vibrations throughout the car and occasionally it triggers some larger shudders that come through the steering wheel, causing me to pull over. Once I've stopped for a moment and get going again its back to the smaller vibrations.
I've had all my wheels aligned and balanced and the problem remains. The mechanic who preformed the balance said that something may be wrong with my steering box from his experience in the car.

The second issue is that the wheel seems to have 4-5" of loose sterring before the wheels actually begin to turn. This is only while going straight, once its engaged it seems to turn fine.

I ran a test on the highway, taking the car into a corner doing 100km/h and noticed that the wobbles and vibrations where all but gone.

From this I came to the assumption that the steering box was broken and needed to be replaced and would solve both problems but from reading through the forums about some of the "Death Wobble" information I'm not sure if I have 2 seperate issues or just one.

If anyone has any idea what could be wrong I'd love to know


Kind Regards,
xp~

 

You're going to have to take a closer look at your front end. There are multiple parts that could contribute to what you're experiencing. And I wouldn't necessarily say that the steering box is as likely as some other candidates like the track bar, ball joints or tie rod ends.

 

Like atmos has said before, unibody flex contributes to that, maybe adding a steering box spacer to replace to stock aluminum one could fix it

 

I don't know if that's the most likely cause of wobbles just going down the highway...

Maybe when offroad

 

That wouldn't fix the problem at all, especially if the unibody is cracked or fatigued in that area


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2

 

Thanks for the advice.

It will be getting a full mechanical check in a couple days so ill give those points to the mechanic so he can have a look and tick or cross them as the cause of the problem.

I'll post the results once its preformed.

Thanks Again, xp~