I replaced my HM Tourist (Avon)5.25x16 with 165r400 Michelin
tires/tyres over the weekend. The great big shimmy that resulted
therefrom is due, I suspect, to one of the tyres/tires not being
completely seated in its mounting, so I will remove all, re-examine,
and try again to balance same. Smooth ride is gone because of said
shimmy but even with the built in vibration but the car corners (with
30 lbs of air) a whole lot better. The shimmy going down the Merritt
Parkway at (any) speed reminded me of a cross-ply versus radial debate
from years ago.
(There is, by the way, just enough room between the sidewall of the
tyre/tire in the front and the spring top to get my fingers in there,
or about 1/3 of an inch. Sisson warns about the whole mess deflecting
enough to tear up the sidewall: we'll certainly see about that as I
pull off the wheels this week.)
I remember years ago discovering, with a BMW 1600/2 that I had in
1967-70 that replacing cross ply tires with radials created a world of
problems, with the macpherson strut suspension being much more
sensitive to radial tire imbalances than to cross ply tire imbalances.
I wondered about that with the Morgan, but decided that this
suspension didn't really resemble a mac strut at all (actually....) so
probably wouldn't have these problems.
The question, as I see it is this:Do Morgan owners prefer radial or
cross ply tires? Part 2 of the question:, revisting a question that I
caught the very tail end of just after getting on the eemail list:
once suspension bits are rebuilt and set according to spec, how do
people cope with shimmy?
By the way, a faulty condenser (Fine on Friday, dead on Saturday) kept
me from getting to Lime Rock on time to run this past weekend. I have
plenty of condensers, but by the time I traced it down, it was too
late to register for the track. Lucas, prince of slowness.
Chip Brown
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