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Old 10-07-2013, 11:22 AM   #1
nefarious986
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Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: San Jose, CA
Posts: 207
Mysterious clunking in rear wheel well .. SOLVED .. with more questions

So I had a "mystery" clunk arise after I mounted my new rear wheel. The clunk was very noticeable and came with every rotation of the wheel.

At first I thought it was bad wheel bearing but they were great before I swapped wheels and I didn't do anything that would have messed them up.

After quite a few times taking the wheel off, spinning the rotors slowly by hand and not hearing the clunk, then remounting the wheel, spinning the wheel slowly by hand and hearing the clunk again, I noticed that the sound always happened where the valve stem was in a certain position and ONLY in that position. That's when it occurred to me .. RUB!!

Sure enough, I took it off and looked at the back. Right where the noise was heard, there was a wheel weight mounted.



And here is the scratch from it rubbing on the strut.



Now its easy enough to is just remove the wheel weight .. get rid of the noise .. and move on with my life.

However, I have a few questions:

1. They also have the normal wheel weight mount stickies on the inside of the rim. So why did they mount another clip style wheel weight there instead of using another sticky tape style weight ? Its road forced balanced, so can I just go back and ask them to re-balance using sticky weights ?

2. There is no noise on the other side rear wheel, so I assume its all good there. Perhaps this can be resolved with an alignment ?

3. Even if the noise stop with realignment or with rebalancing, should I still be concerned that there is so little space between strut / wheel ? Especially if do autocross and trackdays ? I was thinking of running a small 2-3mm spacer on both rear wheel just in case.

LMK what you guys think. Thanks!

Last edited by nefarious986; 10-07-2013 at 11:43 AM.
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