tire vibration

 normally you buy brand new tires on perfectly normal rims and they balance them at the store. You take them out on the highway, and they run perfectly smoothly all the way from 0 to 90 miles an hour.

When you have any kind of vibration make sure to do an alignment. It costs a hundred bucks, but it can save you hundreds more in ruined tires.

In the last couple of years though there have been two situations where i ended up with tires that had a vibration between 65 and 85 miles an hour. It wasn't extremely bad and it didn't continue to get worse. At first it appeared to simply stay the same. But after talking to a tire shop they recommended driving a couple of thousand miles on them and seeing if they would just even out. And for some strange reason on these two particular sets of tires that's what happened.

Now if 5,000 miles later they're still vibrating along then it's time to find a shop that can really come up with an answer. But sometimes there's simply some unevenness that wears off or sort of settles in as the tire runs on pavement.

If a rim is bent, then the tire isn't the problem. someone needs to identify which rim it is and replace it. If there's some other problem, possibly with the alignment, then the tires aren't really the problem. Continuing to drive in this situation will simply ruin the tires.