I don’t drive the car at highway speeds very often – which here in Colorado is somewhere between 75 and 80. So it took a couple of weeks after the rears were replaced with drag radials for me to notice the balance was off on one of the front wheels.
At about 70 the car would start to shake a little, and at a bit over 80 it would go away again – perfect example of a wheel balance issue.
So last Friday I made an 8am Saturday appointment at the tire shop that installed the Nittos to have the wheels rebalanced.
I rolled in at a quarter to 8 and was met by the manager who explained that half of his guys were back in Mexico for ‘family emergencies’ and that he would have to put me off until Tuesday… That’s fine, shit happens.
Tuesday rolls around and he texts to tell me they couldn’t get to it until Wednesday at 3pm… Now I’m starting to wonder what’s up.
Anyway, I got there at a quarter to 3 yesterday and they managed to get the car done at 4 – noting the changes to the weights that they made via their high-tech high-speed balancer – and I drove home.
The car felt better at the 55mph jaunt along Parker Road, so that’s a good sign.
Anyway, I pull into the garage and get out of the car – and that’s when I noticed that one of the drag radials is on the front…
FFS…
It’s not like the tires are nearly identical or something. The tires that go on the back are smooth, wider, have thicker sidewalls, and have like two grooves for legal reasons – while the front tires look like, well, normal tires…
So I boot my roommate out of the garage while I spend the next twenty minutes rotating tires to (A) get the correct tires onto the correct ends of the car, and (B) get the very directional tread on these tires onto the correct sides of the car… Which is where I discover that the tire place just impact-wrenched the lug-nuts into place and it took like 200 pounds of torque to get the 111 pound nuts off…
It used to be that something as brainless as a tire balance could be reliably done without much oversight on my part – apparently those days are gone.
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