2 Attachment(s)
The Truth about Death Wobble
The Truth about Death Wobble
I like to start with my background. I am not a mechanic. What Ive learned about jeeps has been through trial and error with a lot of outside help from people who know better. My most recent learning experience has been with “Death Wobble”.
I used to think that “death wobble” was loose steering. Like you are trying to stay in your lane on the highway and you would need to correct, then correct again, and struggle to keep your truck driving in a straight line. I got this idea from a video where you can see that the hardware used by JEEP in the trackbar bracket and upper and lower control arms is actually not the size of the holes in those components. So the threads in the factory bolts wear the holes in the trackbar and control arms into ovals. Synergy makes a bolt replacement kit for this exact reason. LINK. Loose steering is not death wobble.
Death wobble is not something you barely notice. If you’re not sure you’ve got it, you don’t have it. When it happens, you know it. It happens all at once and is unmistakeable. Death Wobble is when you hit a bump and the steering wheel will rock back and forth violently and you will not be able to control your rig. You cannot drive through it. You need to pull over and stop completely in order for your truck to regain composure. The first time it happened to me, I hit a pot hole on an off ramp at probably 40 mph, and I swore I blew out 2 tires. I finally got the truck to the side of the road, and hopped out thinking about who I was going to call for help, and to my surprise, all tires were intact.
I continued to drive, thinking that it was a one time problem as I couldn’t recreate it at the magnitude that I’d experienced in the first occurance. The jeep felt fine, and I regained confidence driving, false confidence. I had a second occurrence just as bad as the first, in a far more dangerous situation. I was at speed on a highway, lost it completely, had to stop on the highway, with difficult of even getting to the shoulder. The diagnosis was above my mechanical understanding. I knew something was wrong. Terribly wrong, and to my brain…it had to be something big.
My resolve? Change everything. Bought ball joints, stabilizer, planned to change tie rod and drag link. Knowing this was above my head, I enlisted a friend who used to work at a jeep mod shop. How he diagnosed the problem was to lay under the truck while I turned the wheel back and forth without turning the truck on. So the steering wheel didn’t turn much, the tires being planted made it so he could touch the steering components one by one. What he was touching were the tierod ends on the drag link, and the main tie rod, looking for something loose. It was the tie rod end at the top of the drag link attached to the pitman arm.
He made me get under the truck while he turned the wheel to have me feel the tie rod end so I would be able to learn what to look for in the future. He made me touch the tie rod end on the main tie rod to feel what a correct end felt like. Then had me touch the bad tie rod end at the top of the drag link. At first I couldn’t feel the difference, but after a while I could “feel” it. Not even see it. It was sooooo slight. When he got out of the truck, I told him that when the truck loses composure, it REALLY loses composure, that the slight loosness of the tie rod end at the pitman arm seemed too slight to be the problem.
“That’s all it takes” he told me. “Lets change it, and see if its corrected”. Called jeep and got a new tie rod end. $77 with tax.
Once we figured out which end was loose, and acquired the correct replacement part, We started to take the drag link tie rod end out of the pitman arm. It was really in there, we took the nut off, and bashed it with a pickle fork a little while to get it out. Once out we marked the point on the drag link where the tie rod end was sticking up, and counted the revolutions as we unscrewed the tie rod end. 31 revolutions.
A word about replacement parts. If you don’t want to screw around with measurements, you want to go with OEM Jeep parts. We could have gotten an aftermarket tie rod end for $29 bucks, but would it have been the exact same size as jeep’s? Probably not. Had we used it, we would have had to recorrect the steering wheel to make it straight. In my opinion, worth the extra $50 for the Jeep part.
We rotated it into the drag link, rotated it 31 times into position with the end pointing up at the point we marked. Put it back in pitman arm and tightened it back down.
I was skeptical. No way this simple fix was going to correct the nightmare problem in my steering. Especially with a part that was not noticeably loose. I had to touch it to feel it move, I couldn’t see it move. Id learned over the last month, how to make the steering shake with the death wobble problem. I would have to hit a bump at speed with the wheels turned. I have train tracks near my house that I could recreate the problem with. Once we changed the one tie rod end on the drag link, the problem was gone.
I also bought a new fox steering stabilizer, but my friend wouldn’t put it in until we corrected the steering with the old stabilizer as a new stabilizer will mask a steering problem.
Attachment 1317
Attachment 1318
