Wheel balancing

[masami]

Hi,

I found a screw on the right front and got it repaired @ bob jane. When i got home i noticed the tyre was mounted in a different location and all the balance weights were removed.

Is it possible to have a balanced wheel with no weights or did the guy just forget the balance my wheel?

My steering wheel doesnt shake but i havent been on the freeway yet.

Thanks in advance.

[Steampunk]

every time a balance is done, they remove all weights.
I am assuming the weights previously were located on the outer-lip of your wheel? ie. hooks around the lip?
Check the inside of the rim as they may have used the \"stick-on\" type weights.
It's not impossible to have a wheel that is balanced without the use of weights, but improbable.

If you remove the wheel and find no weights whatsoever, I would be concerned and ringing them back to get it re-done.

[masami]

It used to have the stick on weights just behind the wheel spokes and another weight on the inside lip.

hmmm dodgy... I better go get that wheel rebalanced then.

Thanks for your help mate

[JBT]

Is it possible to have a balanced wheel with no weights...

Yes, I've seen it on a friends NC. After market wheel and track tyre.

[StanTheMan]

before you go charging in .....take it along the freeway check it all out

[AJ]

if it has no weights & still drives fine......it's balanced, you'd notice it at anything over 60 kmh otherwise.......if it's a quality rim & a quality tyre, sometimes they don't NEED any weight correction, rare, but it does happen

[Insurgence]

i thought that with my car too.

the weights were on the inside of the wheel.

[skimad]

I had a bad experience with weights that clip on (not the stick on ones)
I had 2 flat tyres the next day as they were not fitted properly, after mentioning this on the forum I was told that shouldn't have used them

[Steampunk]

Stating the obvious, but clip-on weights will only fit wheels that have an appropriate lip that will take them, obviously the fitter only had half a brain and just went \"that'll do\".

Wheel balancers (good ones anyway) will prefer to use the clip-on ones whenever possible as they stay on better than stick-on ones.

[wun911]

I have the sticky ones that go on the inside of the wheel.

(But I got like HEAPS of them)

Does that mean the tyre itsef was created very uneven?

[Okibi]

Coloured dots and stripes - whats that all about?

dots and stripes When you're looking for new tyres, you'll often see some coloured dots on the tyre sidewall, and bands of colour in the tread. These are all here for a reason, but it's more for the tyre fitter than for your benefit.
The dots on the sidewall typically denote unformity and weight. It's impossible to manufacture a tyre which is perfectly balanced and perfectly manufactured in the belts. As a result, all tyres have a point on the tread which is lighter than the rest of the tyre - a thin spot if you like. It's fractional - you'd never notice it unless you used tyre manufacturing equipment to find it, but its there. When the tyre is manufactured, this point is found and a coloured dot is put on the sidewall of the tyre corresponding to the light spot. Typically this is a yellow dot (although some manufacturers use different colours just to confuse us) and is known as the weight mark. Typically the yellow dot should end up aligned to the valve stem on your wheel and tyre combo. This is because you can help minimize the amount of weight needed to balance the tyre and wheel combo by mounting the tire so that its light point is matched up with the wheel's heavy balance point. Every wheel has a valve stem which cannot be moved so that is considered to be the heavy balance point for the wheel.
As well as not being able to manufacture perfectly weighted tyres, it's also nearly impossible to make a tyre which is perfectly circular. By perfectly circular, I mean down to some nauseating number of decimal places. Again, you'd be hard pushed to actually be able to tell that a tyre wasn't round without specialist equipment. Every tyre has a high and a low spot, the difference of which is called radial runout. Using sophisticated computer analysis, tyre manufacturers spin each tyre and look for the 'wobble' in the tyre at certain RPMs. It's all about harmonic frequency (you know - the frequency at which something vibrates, like the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse). Where the first harmonic curve from the tyre wobble hits its high point, that's where the tyre's high spot is. Manufacturers typically mark this point with a red dot on the tyre sidewall, although again, some tyres have no marks, and others use different colours. This is called the uniformity mark. Correspondingly, most wheel rims are also not 100% circular, and will have a notch or a dimple stamped into the wheel rim somewhere indicating their low point. It makes sense then, that the high point of the tyre should be matched with the low point of the wheel rim to balance out the radial runout.

http://www.carbibles.com/tyre_bible.html

[Steampunk]

How many is heaps? a few \"milky-bar\" like ones dotted all around the wheel?

That is not unusual.

Keep in mind that wheel and tyre makers would unlikely get everything 100% symmetrical.
Dents, large scrapes and scratches, stuck-on debris, the way the tyre sits on the wheel, etc. affects symmetry.

[NMX516]

It's certainly do-able. I've had wheels/tyres balanced before by moving the tyre around on the rim to get it right. Good quality wheels and tyres will need very little in the way of wheel weight added, if any at all.

masami, if the tyres are evenly worn, just take it off the car and see if it is happy to stand up on the tread, on its own - on level ground of course. If it is, fair chance it's well balanced. If it falls straight over, take it back. Roll it along the ground too. Again if it falls over quickly and easily....