[alfa] vibrations

[Joe Elliott <jee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks to everyone who suggested that my scary vibration might have 
been a missing wheel weight--that suggestion made me realize that it 
was probably the mud caked on my wheels.  After a car wash and some 
driving in the rain, the vibration was still there so I was worried. 
I finally borrowed a socket (PO put wrong-size studs and nuts on the 
muddy wheel) and a breaker bar (damn "professionals" who installed my 
new tires in August seriously overtightened them!) and removed the 
muddy wheel to reveal a huge amount of gravel, sticks, and dirt caked 
to the inside.  I managed to cram it into a commercial dish 
sanitizer, and that cleaned it up pretty well.  Now I'm 
vibration-free at freeway speeds!

What I want to know now is how an imbalanced wheel can make the whole 
car shake like that.  It can't move any more than the tire will 
deflect, and I would think that any movement that small would be 
taken up by the suspension.  My rough calculations indicate that the 
wheel would be spinning at about 16 rad/s, and I would think that the 
related vibration would have the same frequency, but it felt higher 
than that to me.

-Joe
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