Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Maintenance & Servicing Steering Column Play and a speed wobble

Hi all.

My 96 Plus 8 has always had some play in steering but it seems a little worse now and I think it's related to the speed wobbles I have... I am getting pretty serious vibration at circa 58mph and around 75mph. It makes the wheel judder quite heavily...

Anyone had similar? Found a fix? It's a royal pain that detracts from touring so want to sort...

I would check the steering damper blades.

How many miles on the car??

27000 miles.

Where are steering damper blades located?

Also try swapping the wheels front to rear.

When you jack the front of the car up is there any play vertically or horizontally when you rock the roadwheel (make sure someone holds the steering wheel firmly). This will tell you if you have play in the wheel bearings, kingpins or track rod ends or possibly the steering rack itself or any of the path back to the steering wheel ie the universal joint in the engine bay.
If none is present it could be wheel balance or a "flat" on the tyre caused by sitting for too long in one spot, this later point is not so likely as it would be present at all roadspeeds.

What you are experiencing is a fairly common thing with these cars from time to time. We had a Roadster owner on here who bought the car brand new - several trips back to the factory with wheel imbalance problems. The factory replaced his wheels as they had a bad batch delivered so don't worry overly about it. They are very simple engineering and any "hands on" older garage mechanic can sort it out.

Here is a useful link to the damper blades.
http://www.gomog.com/allmorgan6.html#Damper

GoMog is a very useful technical resource.

Good luck with the diagnosis.

perfect thanks will have a look through blades location. Seems like a common issue for people but finding the source is tricky!

That is spot on Alex.

Do you have wire wheels or 5 stud fixing alloys ?.

The reason for asking being that unless the tyre/wheel balancer has the right cones for the wires this can cause problems of imbalance, effectively they are not spinning the wheel around it's true centre if they are incorrect.

I have the Morgan Lightweight Alloys on my Plus 8 they are 16" X 7" Centrelock rims and they need the correct size cones for proper balancing.

I have the 5 stud alloys. I had the tyres rebalanced before Xmas which I thought helped, but then a 3 hour drive up to Vienna showed it up again and seems worse now.

Having read the blades link I feel that's next logical step to explore...

That's a good place to start - while you are under there it's well worth at least every 1,000mls checking and tightening all the suspension related nuts and bolts, this needs to be done routinely. The whole car feels totally different afterwards.