Steering wheel shake after taking off tires 2 days after alignment

So I noticed something interesting today that I wanted to ask people on here about. A few days ago I had some new lower ball joints installed. Because of that, the shop that installed them also aligned my front end. Before having any of this done, I had a decent shake in my steering wheel from around 25mph to about 60mph, which I know there are threads about. After the ball joints and alignment, this shake seemed to disappear. I've been driving the truck a couple days since the work and noticed that it drove smoother and whatnot and was quite happy with it.
Today I took my front wheels off to try and install some new brake lines, which ended up not working out because my old ones seem to be frozen on. So after fighting with the brake lines and getting no where I bled the brakes and put the wheels back on and ended up driving around to run some errands. The minute I got on the road, the steering wheel shake was back and pretty bad.
Is there any reason that simply taking the wheels off and putting them back on should cause this steering wheel shake to come back so bad? Figure my alignment shouldn't be off that much from just removing the tires should it?
Would appreciate any input on this as I'm just trying to understand what happened. I've got to make a trip next weekend thats about 4000 miles round trip and don't feel like having such a shaky steering wheel the whole way.

 

Re-torqued the lug nuts? Accidentally knock off a wheel weight?

 

Wheel weights all accounted for. I torqued the lug nuts as best I could... I don't have air tools like the shop does though, if that accounts for anything

 

I just had a similar situation happen to me. Last year I got new tires and ran them with my alignment off camber for a while- like 10 months. I intstalled TC UCAs not too long ago and got the truck aligned as you should. The first couple of weeks went by and everything was great, then the steering wheel shake snuck up. It shook violently for about a month, but I figured I would try and wear the tires down where they needed to be worn since there was tread that needed to be worn from the misalignment in the past. Long story short, a BALANCE was the key. I got the tires balanced at Toyota yesterday for $39.95 with a coupon, and now I have a smooth as silk ride. It was way worth it. Sounds like this is your problem, your tires aren't used to the new alignment. I would get your tires balanced before looking at other suspension components.

 

Off topic op, but sick front bumper, can't wait to get the sos hybrid myself. Is yours steel or aluminum? Any noticeable sag?

 

Appreciate your info. I'll look into getting my tires balanced again... they have an awful lot of weights on them. Tires aren't new at all though.
And yes its a SOS hybrid, with filler plates. It's steel and I've got no sag, but my front coils are pretty stiff. I love this bumper though. Eddy is awesome

 

I had an issue of the weights getting knocked off by the calipers, tire shop used the sticky weights on the inside, once they rebalanced using the clamp style weights it was fine.

 

If it started immediately after having your tires off, then its most likely a weight got knocked off.

 

On the road? Cause my garage is clean and from last time I checked they were all on. It was doing it before the alignment too.

 

Are those aftermarket rims hub centric or lug centric ?

check this out tsu00296.pdf

 

Didn't you say there was no shake prior to taking off the tires?

Also this.

 

This is why I said wheel weights.

 

The tires are hub centric, and there was a shake before the alignment and ball joint replacement, then post removing tires.

 

Well, if they were shaking prior, then it's probably still wheels in need of balancing.

 

I'll have them checked.

 

Long story short, redo your wheel install making sure to cross pattern your lug nuts. Shop I usually use was too busy and was sent to another, after install of new tires had steering shake at hwy speeds, had same shop redo balancing and said all was ok, truck then had less shaking kind of random. I did a rotate today and had to drop off the wife's hhr, no shake at this point running on the same roads that I've notice the issue. You may have just been slightly off on centered.

 

I'll give this a shot tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be taking it into a shop to finish my brake line install, so best case scenario, they'll do it right for me and check my balance.

 

Ran through a half tank of gas today, no shaking. I used the procedure of hand tight alternating sides, then back around with a normal socket wrench without applying too much force, then one last time with the torque wrench @ 100lbs. Too much torque can cause problems also, you can torque over 100lbs by hand, if you had to give it all you had to tighten them, you went to far.