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.

http://i40.tinypic.com/2i92xs9.jpg

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

http://i44.tinypic.com/732wjq.jpg

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!

I had the exact same thing happen - except we didn't figure it out until I'd replaced the wheel bearings and rebuilt the CV joints! The root cause in my case was the combination of 1/2" wider rear wheels from a 996 with the slightly wider shock body of the PSS9's. I now run a spacer (with that particular set of wheels) in the rear.

What wheels? What is the offset? A wheel weight should not rub a strut (obviously). Spacers may be in order.

Volk TE37s in staggered 18x8.5, 18x10.5 with a 41ET offset. Bought on eBay and guaranteed to fit Boxster. Yeah, it fits alright if I dont turn hard or have the wheel balanced. LOL.

I remounted the old 7mm spacer from the previous set of wheels to only the new right wheel and went for a test drive. The original problem on the right wheel well went away immediately BUT the left rear wheel made some noise during left hand turn probably due to flex & movements, so alignment wasn't going to fix the entire issue.

I decided to get a set of 3mm hubcentric spacers and will most likely also do an alignment after everything is on.

You can file it a little or use a hammer to flatten the part that's hitting the shock.

I'm glad to hear you resolved it. I wouldn't expect it to be a wheel weight, but it adds to knowledge. :)