During a trip to the “King Cruise” car-meeting, I got a sense there was something wrong on the 1957 Chrysler I was driving.
It felt like a wheel was ‘getting’ out of balance and I had to slown down a bit on the freeway to keep the car from starting to vibrate.
Luckily I got caught-up in heavy traffic on the highway, so speeds were down regardless.
At one point the vibration became more noticable so I pulled over to have a look to check for loose wheelnuts or any other damages but nothing was found.
With only 10 minutes of driving to go until the parkinglot where the meeting was, I drove on carefully. At one point I started to notice a wobble in the car when cornering slowly. This was my notice-sign that something was really wrong.
At the meeting, I still couldn’t see anything wrong with any of the wheels, until I felt around the left front tire and noticed a large bulge on the tire-profile.
Turned out the inner canvasbelt(s) had torn and the tire was losing its construction.
Result of the failure was most likely the tire being overpressurized in the past, damaging the inner structure.
I managed to borrow a spare tire from a fellow Mopar-driver and had to borrow 4 ‘regular’ wheelnuts from a Chevy 😉 because the spare tire wheel used different wheelnuts than I had on the car.
With the help of friends we manage to get the borrowed spare wheel aired-up as well and mounted on the car.
Unfortunatly, this was one of the custommade tires with dual white-lines which I had made by Diamond Back Tires some years ago, so now I would have to change all the tires on the car, or have 2 more tires made. Not sure yet what my plans will be at the moment.
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