vibrating and steering wheel shaking at 50+ mph

[RobCLE]

I Have a 2000 chevy Silverado 1500. And this winter here in Cleveland has been really hard on cars and trucks. Around the Middle of winter I noticed that when I drive over 50 mph the steering wheel starts to shake and there is a loud humming noise going along with a heavy vibration that I just can't pin point where it was coming from. Both the front hubs have been replaced. I've had a few mechanics look at it they said it is possibly the carrier bearing in the driveshaft, something with the rear end or possibly the steering stabilizer. If anyone has any ideas and possible a little help that would be great

[BlackZ71Silverado]

Have you had your tires checked? Sounds like they may be worn unevenly by what you descibe. That may be the case if you had bad hubs.

[Dnt]

Man that sounds just like my 06 silverado it had a set of factory good year tires that made me think that it had a bad hub bearing. It was the tires, I tossed the factory craptastic good years in the trash at less than 30k miles with what looked to be 3/4 tread left and installed a set of Michelin LT/MS and never had any other problems with it. Drove like a completely different truck with the new Michelins. I now run Michelins on everything I own and swear by them. I think that they are well worth the extra dollars...... speaking from experience on this I have been where you are at man get yourself a set of Michelins as soon as possible, life is to short to put up with crappy tires.

[esox07]

I have had this problem on two other vehicles that I have owned. It turned out to be tires on both. I went through alignments, tire balancing and other fixes since the tires in both cases were not near being worn out according to tread. I drove with that annoying problem on my 04 Blazer for probably 30,000 miles before I finally got a new set of Michelins (just like myfavtruck) and problem solved. If I was sure that was the problem, I would have replaced them much sooner, but I didn't want to replace seemingly good tires on a hunch. In hindsight, I wish I had.

If you can find another set to throw on your truck to test drive with, it would at least narrow down the tires as being the problem.

[RobCLE]

Thank you for your help. After tires were rotated and balance the shaking stopped but the noise persisted. After further Investigation the conclusion is that the carrier bearing in the drive shaft was worn out and needed replaced.