Steering Wheel Wobble Advice Needed Please

[Redwine]

I have a wobble through my steering wheel when I brake lightly from over 60mph and its driving me nuts. It onlys occurs during light braking from 60+ mph and doesnt wobble at all when not braking.

My wheels have been balanced and aligned perfectly by a specialist, my tyres appear in good shape, all the suspension and steering bits and pieces are fine. So that led me to thinking the discs were knackered. So I spent hours carefully cleaning the hub mating surfaces, fitted new discs and pads, bedded them in for 300 miles and guess what the wobble is still there.

So I then changed the wheels front to back, back to front and diagonally and correctly torqued the wheel nuts AND not only does it still wobble but my steering wheel is now several degrees off centre to the right, so it looks like I'm doing a right hand bend while going straight ahead. Fantastic!

Please can someone shed some light on this before I explode

[Fat Slob]

An outside possibility could be that the new discs are warped already, even though you were careful it could have been a duff batch.

Another possibility is the tyres. I assume bulges, damage etc... would have showed up when the guy balanced them but I had a steering wheel shimmy which disappeared after I changed the standard Dunlops to Yokohama tyres. I do know how frustrating it can be endlessly chucking money at a problem and nothing seems to sort it.

[nobeard]

A few of us on here have had the same problem. Can't speak for the others, but mine was eventually traced to a warped/bent alloy. Or at least that is what the Toyota Dealer said - returned it to me after a week - I said I didn't want it back until it was fixed. This wasn't picked up when the wheels were balanced (they were done 3 times). All 4 wheels were swapped from another model.

Prior to this, I tried rotating the wheels around and that didn't fix it either. So perhaps even if the duff one is on the back it will vibrate. Mine did it from 65/70 mph upwards.

Don't know if this helps, but my front discs have now really badly warped (seems a common Avensis problem) - terrible vibration - mainly through the steering wheel but only when braking from highish speed. These are being replaced this week, but this problem isn't causing any general wheel wobble/vibration when driving along. Good luck...

[Stephen Kowalzcuk]

The reason your steering wheel is now off to the right is probably because you rotated the wheels. Not a good idea in my opinion, I know all the manuals say rotate them, but if you've done 10,000 miles on a tyre then swap it diagonally it will be going in the the other direction, that must disturb the wear pattern you've laid down and from my experience causes vibraton and other problems. Front to back on the same side is fine, but diagonally isnt too clever. Switch em back I would and I bet your steering wheel will straighten up.