Lifted Jeep Cherokee
How to Fix Your Lifted Jeep Cherokee’s
Lifted Grand Cherokee
Lifted Grand Cherokee
If you drive a Jeep Cherokee or Grand Jeep Cherokee and are considering a suspension lift, you may want to think twice. I bought a brand new 2001 Jeep Cherokee a couple years ago, and almost immediately stacked on Pro Comp’s 3” lift kit with some 32 x 11.50 r 15 Super Swamper TSL tires. After a couple months of good riding, I started to experience what jeep enthusiasts have come to know as “the death wobble.”
The death wobble is basically when you are driving your lifted jeep down the road and the front end starts to shake violently. Now it doesn’t throw you off the road or anything … the front end just shakes. Basically, with the exception of my original lift springs, the reinstallation of the entire Pro Comp lift kit with “better” components.
My new components were working brilliantly. For the next couple months, I experienced the death wobble every time I hit a pothole, crack, or even merged onto a simple uneven lane.
Back at the shop, the guys, obviously not recognizing me from six months before, gave me the same proposal as the first time … almost word for word, too. My shocks, track bar, pitman arm and control arms were all shot again and needed replaced with their “better and stronger components.” All my components were fine. The shaking was coming from the frame rail, which is connected to the axle.
What was happening was simple: My tires, as off road tires tend to do, kept going out of balance. Therefore, when I hit a pothole or uneven pavement, or too high a road speed, the tires would start to wobble and fight back and forth against each other. This is probably how Fred Flintstone felt driving around with those rock tires. The fighting tires would cause the axle to shake back and forth, which in turn caused the frame rail to shake. Hence the death wobble. Now the wobble could have been stabilized by the bar attached to the frame rail; if only it was attached to a real frame.
See, Jeep Cherokees and Jeep Grand Cherokees have what is referred to as a unibody design. It can handle 31s or 32s, but if you get any bigger or heavier tires, it won’t be strong enough to consistently support them. If you want to lift a Jeep vehicle for off road purposes, I’d recommend a Wrangler. It has a frame, meaning it can handle big and heavy tires, not to mention a roll over.
If you’ve already got a Jeep Cherokee and are experiencing death wobble, don’t listen to the guys at the shop. Test each of the components of your front end yourself. It should fix the problem right away, at least until the tires go out of balance again. To end it permanently, unless you can somehow fabricate a stabilizer bar to strengthen the front-end frame rail, the only thing you can really do is switch down to smaller tires. Or buy a normal road car …
By: Nathaniel Long
this post is very usefull thx!