On 7/30/2012 3:39 PM, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"Jack Skolasky" wrote in message
...
On 7/30/2012 11:03 AM, Jim Wilkins wrote:
"Jack Skolasky" wrote in message
I think trying to figure out how to balance your own wheels is
just
absurd.

Five trips to two tire shops hadn't cured speed-dependent steering
wheel shake.

Then either you don't have a wheel balance problem, or you are
patronizing incompetent and/or unethical businesses.

If you read my post you'd see I had a broken upper shock absorber
mount. It wasn't visible without sticking my head way into the
wheelwell. Being disconnected it failed to absorb the minor vibration
of slight imbalance as it should have and let the suspension resonate
at around 30 and 60MPH.

Don't be so defensive. I haven't attacked your choice to buy services
rather than learn skills. As a downtown apartment dweller I couldn't
do much either.

I do an informal "make-or-buy" analysis for all kinds of service and
repair tasks, much as any firm might do (a "make-or-buy" flag is a
standard field on a parts master in any ERP computer package.) What
I've found is that over time, and as manufactured goods become
simultaneously (and somewhat paradoxically) both more complex and
cheaper, the option to do it myself becomes less and less economically
sensible. Either the the repair shouldn't be done at all - the total
cost of it exceeds the cost of replacement - or it requires an
ever-increasing amount of sophisticated tools and technical expertise.

This is not a new phenomenon, but the pace of it is accelerating. My
grandfather, a fairly mechanically adept farmer in downstate Illinois
when the Great Depression started, never did accommodate himself to the
throwaway culture that had emerged and begun to take over by the time he
died in 1969.