I have a 2002 clk 55 and am experiencing a vibration throughout the car and in the steering wheel. I have had all the wheels balanced and they are perfect and the alignment was just done. The vibration was pretty bad and I replaced the front rotors and pads after finding out that they were warped. This did help quite a bit and the vibration is now 90% gone but still hanging around. It seems that it is there throughout all speed ranges, you can feel it in the steering wheel as well as the rest of the car, again it is very faint but still there. One thing that I noticed is that lately that if the car is outside in the cold and sits for awhile when you first start out the steering wheel shakes more, actually pretty bad when starting out under brisk acceration. After driving around and the car has a chance to warm up its back down to a faint vibration. Its seems from my searching here on the forums it may be the steering damper but would like some additional input before I start chasing the problem in the wrong direction.

Do you have original fatory wheels? If not it sounds like you have wheels that are not hub-centric. You describe a really bad wheel balance issue.

You are right, these are aftermarket wheels. I believe these are hub centric wheels though. The wheels are made by TSW and are called Bremma's. They are a knockoff of the two piece AMG double 5 spoke wheels. I did purchase these off of a well know national wheel company that supposidly test fits these wheels, also TSW shows these as a direct fitment in their database for my car. I believe that by hub centric you mean that the wheels when mounted are centered on the hub by the middle ring and are not centered with only the lugnuts. This is the case and there seems to be no play or movement when mounted without the lugs. Any other thoughts?

Bruce, the vibration you feel after your car sits for a while in the cold is likely due to a temporary set of the tires (flat spot on bottom) that goes away as the tires warm up. Try having you wheels/tires road force balanced with a Hunter balancing machine to remove the last noticeable bit of vibration. Otherwise you may have a tire problem ... slipped belt, etc. Perhaps you could mount another set of wheels/tires to see if the vibration disappears. I presume all suspension components are up to snuff.

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Fred Hoelzle

Thanks for the advice. I am going to have them rebalanced on a Hunter machine this week and we'll see what happens.