Are Your Trailer Tires Balanced?
Are your trailers wheels balanced? I don' think any of the trailers I have had had balanced wheels. I just changed the wheels on my TH and was wondering should I balance the wheels or not? I h...
Forum Discussion
JIMNLIN wrote:
Balancing a tire off the trailer is a feel good thing IMO.
Trailer hubs aren't balanced so weights on a wheel/tire assy may help or may make more imbalance in the assy. Lug holes are steel stamped in the wheels centers....and may or may not be concentric with the wheels tire bead seats.
A Goodyear truck tire tech showed me this on one of my tandem axle GN trailers when I first got started towing for a living.
He spun each tire up on the trailer and they all had different amounts of surprisingly small vibrations. Keep in mind trailer springs are only around 26"-28" long so they along make pretty good bounce diffusers.
He then spun each wheel on the trailer with the old spin balance machine and added a few weights to 3 wheels and non on the forth.....then matched marked a lug to the stem each wheel ....... and each wheel in each position.
To make a point he rotated one wheel out of sink about 180 degrees with the match mark....then spun the wheels he had added weight to and of course their was more vibration.
This was the only way he would balance tires on a customers trailer.
If the dealer can't spin balance the old way I don't bother with balance....on my trailers.
With 105k on two sets of LT tires that weren't balanced on my current RV trailer and all the other RV trailers and non rv trailers we never had any issues from tires being out of balance.
trailer tires are a good application for balance beads, they will balance out the wheels and hubs, I've used them for years and they very effective. most tire shops will tell you otherwise, probably because they don't want to deal with beads everywhere when replacing tires.
