Vibration Shaking While Driving Your Car How to Diagnose Wobbling

Here we have a small SUV that has a wobble when accelerating. That's what we're gonna go over in this video.

Now, whenever you have a wobble, or a vibration, the first thing you want to look at is tires, to make sure they're not wearing abnormally, or out of round, or even out of balance. Another thing you want to check is the suspension. Make sure none of the shocks are leaking, or struts, and nothing's loose in the front end. None of the tie rod ends are loose, or even ball joints, or even a loose wheel bearing. And also CV shafts. You want to check those out, make sure they're not binding up. If any of the boots are ripped, they're gonna need to be replaced.

So, all those things checked out on this vehicle. So that leaves us to check out the drive shaft. Now, something we notice about this center support bearing, if you actually spin it, you can see that it's off-kilter a little bit, kind of like egg-shaped. So that's caused by this being held up for about eight years, as long as the vehicle is in there, and some of this rubber has deteriorated a little bit. Now that may not directly have caused any of the vibration, but it could have. The drive shaft not being at the correct angle could have caused more of that vibration, or wobble.

And then we're gonna check the U joints. Now you want to grab one side of the U joint and the drive shaft, and just try to rock it back and forth. See if there's any play in there. If there's any play, then those U joints are bad. Now, there's no play there, but I can move this U joint this way, and it feels a little bit notchy. But I can't move it the other way. It's rock solid the other way, so this U joint's seized up. You can see there's actually some grease slinging out of the U joint.

Now these U joints really aren't serviceable. The ones that you do find generally don't work, or don't work for very long. So if we check this other U joint, this moves nice, both directions. So this U joint is okay, and there's no play there, if I grab the yoke side of it and then the drive shaft side, there's no play there, rocking it back and forth. So the best thing to do in our situation, we're gonna replace the entire drive shaft.

So, our vibration is gone. We fixed the problem. I hope this video helped you out. If it did, make sure you subscribe to our channel. Ring that bell, turn on all notifications, so you don't miss any of our videos.