There are a lot of potential causes for death wobble, from under-inflated or out-of-balance tires to improper wheel alignment, but if you ask any mechanic, they’ll tell you that the most common culprit is the track bar. We spoke with our good friend Gary Fields, owner of Diesel Pros in Belgrade, MT, to get to the bottom of the situation. “The track bar is definitely responsible for most of the death wobble concerns out there. Dodges have a solid-axle monobeam-style suspension that utilizes a track bar. If it’s equipped with a solid front axle, then it’s prone to death wobble.”
Death wobble, then, is essentially the act of the front axle shifting very rapidly under the vehicle’s frame. The lateral stabilizer is responsible for locating and keeping that axle centered underneath the frame. There are bushings at each end of the track bar that allow it to move up and down and provide some form of cushion, and when those bushings (or any other component of the track bar) go bad, “that axle has a tendency to move side-to-side independent of the frame, and that’s not supposed to happen,” Gary says.
Okay, so just slap a steering stabilizer on your truck and you’re good to go, right? Not so fast. While a steering stabilizer will certainly help your steering to be smoother overall, it is absolutely not a fix for death wobble. As simple as it sounds, the best way to fix it is to inspect your vehicle and properly diagnose the issue. “People are looking for cheap, easy fixes to this kind of stuff,” Gary says, “and you really have to look at the bigger picture. You have to recognize that actually taking the time and money to diagnose it properly is going to be far better in the long run.”
You have to be smart with how you go about determining the problem, though. As Gary explains, “It goes misdiagnosed pretty often. I think an understanding of steering and suspension is lacking, honestly. You get a lot of places that’ll throw a vehicle up on a hoist and they’ll shake the tires back and forth and up and down and attempt to diagnose steering linkage. But the fact of the matter is there’s no better way to test it than with the vehicle weight on the tires.”