Balancing tyres in the old days
Many of the older car drivers (like myself) will remember the way that we used to balance wheels in the old days. The machine was just piece of metal that literally sat on a spindle with a buble in the centre where the wheel was put and wherever the tyres tilted a lead balance weight was placed at the opposite side to counter balance the wheel until the wheel laid straight across in a flat position. Those days though cars would only do 80 mph maximum and there were very few motorways to test your speed, so perhaps balancing was not so important in those days.
Nowadays if you own a car then you should be concerned about the safety to yourself, your passengers, and the other people on the road. Tyres are a big investment requiring proper care. Tyre pressure, changing the tyres round on the car and tyre balancing are three important elements, not forgetting the wheel alignment ?.
Looking after your tyre pressures, is very important for the safety of everyone in your car and other road users that may be on the road. The correct tyre pressures are also very important, Under-inflated tyres are more dangerous than over-inflated tyres, but both can be dangerous, so keep the tyres at the correct pressures.. If they are under-inflated they will over heat, this could lead to premature failure and a blow-out at high speed. Whereas over-inflated tyres cause rapid tread wear which leads to poor vehicle handling on the road.
Basically, wheel balancing evenly distributes the mass from the centre out wards on the wheel. If the weight is not evenly distributed, it will cause vibrations while driving at certain speeds, between 50 and 70 mph is the normal speeds that you will feel out of balanced wheels vibration through the steering wheel also pulling the car to the left or right. This can harm your steering parts by causing premature wear on the parts, this is due to the vibration. The slightest weight imbalance can trigger vibration which needs to be adjusted by a tyre centre professional who use a specialized balancing machine.(we have two).
Our tyre technicians check for heavy spots on the wheel-tyre combination by mounting it on an electric balancing machine which spins the tyre and locates any heavy spots on the wheel. If a side is heavier than the another then the machine automatically picks this up and this means the tyre is out-of-balance. Our machines then tell us exactly where the wheel and tyres are out of balance and by placing a measured lead weight on the opposite side of the heavy spot the tyre is then correctly balanced. Basically a tyre and wheel is out of balance when one section of the tyre is heavier than another.
Aaron balancing a wheel electronically
These days we balance every single wheel that we fit tyres to.
This is always included in the cost of a new tyre, even if the tyre is a cheap tyres. After the car has been driven on the road there are many reasons for wheels to go out-of-balance for instance each time you drive your car and the wheel rotates, it is possible to loose an original weight, or hard braking and acceleration causing the tyre to rotate hence losing their original balance weights. For accurate tyre balancing an up-to-date spin balancer is perfect for both static and dynamic balance, we have two balancers on the go all the time, they are wonderful machines and perfect for the fast cars of to days motoring and fast cars.
These cars have now got much larger, wider, and heavier tyres and rims and need dynamic balancing which is possible through a modern electric spin balancer. Most balancing machines provides accuracy to tenths of a gram and we are able to balance any car on the road today.
