Originally Posted by Towmanjbo

Had to do a wheel bearing in the Focus today. Just finished in fact. I'd been dealing with the noise for the past 7k miles or so. At first I didn't know what it was, it was a loud whirring noise but none of the tires rocked. I thought it was the tires to be honest but after swapping the snows on it was still there. Today on the way into work it went from bad to worse! On disassembly I probably could have waited longer but I'm glad it's done

Originally Posted by Email

I have to say that I’m disappointed. When I spoke with you yesterday you told me that more than a single tech test drove my Excursion and didn’t notice a vibration and therefore couldn’t track it down. I did mention on more than one occasion that it happens only at freeway speeds and that it’s fairly constant above 65 MPH, and that this vibration was not present before I brought it in for you to install new front tires. I drove from Wilbraham down I-91 to Hartford today and then back home via I-84 to Union, and the vibration was almost constant.

The odometer read 117,430 miles when it was dropped off, and this morning when I picked it up it had 117,441 miles. Simple math reveals that it was driven only 11 miles, and the shortest interstate loop I can make happen on Google Maps from your address is 9.7 miles, and that’s only including a 0.9 mile stretch on I-291. But of course if more than one tech drove it there is no possible way that I can find for it to have been driven on the interstate, and I can assure you that a vibration that occurs above 65 MPH isn’t going to be detectible at the 30-40 MPH that’s possible on the back roads around Wilbraham.

This afternoon I figured I would take a look and see what I thought, I’ve been working on cars for over ten years now and am fairly good at tracking down issues. What I found has me very frustrated; the first thing that I noticed was that I had one relatively new valve stem on the passenger side front, and one that’s obviously years old on the driver’s side. Looking at the back tires I notice the same, the valve stems are mismatched. I reached for my tread depth gauge to see, and sure enough whomever last removed the tires to balance them mixed the fronts and rears up. The two existing tires have only 5,000 miles on them, and sure enough those are the ones that have the newer looking valve stems. Whomever installed my new tires at your shop didn’t replace the 8-year-old valve stems, and they are both still missing valve caps!

Something else that I noticed was that on the two tires that I looked at had two wheel weights on the outside rim. Now I haven’t worked at a tire shop since high school, but I was always taught that whenever you rebalance a wheel you remove the old wheel weights, which was clearly not done. Something else I found interesting was that the new tires you installed last week also have two wheel weights, which means that they were most likely out of balance when re-checked after I brought it back.

In summary, every single thing that I’ve brought this thing to you to fix has been done incorrectly. New valve stems weren’t installed with my new tires. They were balanced incorrectly the first time as evidenced by two wheel weights at different spots on the rim. When I brought it back the tech rebalanced them and didn’t remove the old weights, and when reinstalling the tires he mismatched the pairs. And finally, when I drove it back to you for the third time and it was there for a whole day it was driven only 11 miles, and clearly none of that was at speeds that could have been useful for diagnosing a vibration that only happens at freeway speeds.

Every time I take my Excursion back to see you costs me nearly three hours of my time and more than $20 in gas when I account for being picked up and dropped off by my wife, so you can imagine my frustration at the repeated attempts to correct this issue. At this point I don’t even care about that noise that I mentioned to you that it was making after the manifold replacement; that was there before you replaced the tires and is far less irritating than the constant vibration that I now see on the highway with the new tires. Every mile I put on those eight-year-old Firestones that your shop replaced was smoother than what I’m getting out of my new BF Goodrich tires. After all of this, the term “frustrated” doesn’t even begin to adequately describe how I feel about this right now.