shimmy shimmy shake shake

[dragynmyrlin]

Just replaced a completely destroyed driver's side axle on a 95 Voyager. Bopught the car in middle of winter and neglected to slide under it in the snow to realize it had been in an accident and was probably broken when we bought it. Car seems to run fine except for a shimmy you can feel between 30 and 40 mph that was not there before the axle problem. Nothing under, nothing over. Tires are only about a month old and were balanced when we bought them, but axle was put on later. Can't see or feel anything else, just this vibration under your feet between those two speeds. Incidentally, there was no normal feel of a bad axle; no clicking, no alignment problem, nada. The only way we found it was the pulley on the power steering pump shattered, breaking the belt and damaging the resevoir. After a long tow home and a difficult replacement of the pully, noticed that the axle had separated so far from the engine that it pushed the whole engine over several inches causing the pulley to rub, which shattered it. You would think there would have been some feeling there was something wrong but this car handled great, right up until then! No codes, no handling problems now. Any suggestions about the shimmy?

[daveyhouse]

check ball joints and tire rod ends. These will cause a shimmy at certain speeds. Another thing to check would be proper alignment of the engine. You can check this by removing both axle bolts from hub assembly. Then pushing each axle in as far as they will go. Check to see if they are going in the same distance, you should have the same amount of axle sticking out of your hub assembley on both sides.
Hope this helps,
Dave

[trannyman52]

inside the cv axle // there is a spring-load putting pressure {out-ward}
on the axle. If the spring is broken//or damaged,,,, the cv axle
cannot "float" which sometimes causes a weird shimmy.
The axle will not look bad /// and when pressure is off the axle
{car jacked up} will run normal This has to be checked with the
axle taken off the van.

[RexNfx400]

Yep, bad axle joint.

In the '80s Mopar FWDs the mounts would go so bad then take out the cv axle. But with these models the engine don't really seem to fall out that easily.

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