Balancing Rear Tires?

olfarmer wrote:
I say balance all. I have beads in mine and they mostly work OK. My MH sits for long periods of time and I do seem to have a little vibration for several miles once out on the road, it seems to go away after awhile. I think I would rather have them spin balanced. I suppose after sitting for awhile the beads kind of clump together on the low side of the tire? I am not sure if that is correct but that is how it feels to me when driving it.

Actually after a tire sits for a period of time the tire is deformed and it takes several miles for the tire to heat up and go back to its original shape.

This will happen regardless how the tire was balanced. The nylon bias ply tires of the past were very bad about this.

I say balance all. I have beads in mine and they mostly work OK. My MH sits for long periods of time and I do seem to have a little vibration for several miles once out on the road, it seems to go away after awhile. I think I would rather have them spin balanced. I suppose after sitting for awhile the beads kind of clump together on the low side of the tire? I am not sure if that is correct but that is how it feels to me when driving it.

Balanced all of them on Road Force Balancer. Rides great.
Some don't balance the rears thinking imbalance among four drive wheels will even out.
It doesn't.

I've got a set of Centramatics for the Ford F53 V10 chassis setting in my garage because I couldn't tell any difference with them after I put them on. In my book there a waste of money that never helped me - on two different motorhomes. I hope they helped others get a smooth ride but they didn't do me any good.

Besides the beads (and of course traditional weights), there are also the Centramatic balancers. It's the same basic idea as beads, but a spearate gizmo rather than something stuck in the tires. They aren't exactly inexpensive, but do work and work nicely.

(Just make sure your tire guys understand that the hole in the Centramatic disk for dually wheels is there so you can reach the valve stem of the inner tire, and should be so aligned....)

On our last motorhome we bought new tires for the rear at about the 40,000 mile mark. They were supposed to be balanced using Equal Balance Beads. As time went on the ride got worse and worse. It was obvious the rear tires were out of balance.

It finally got to the point that we stopped at a tire dealer in Florida and aske to have the beads removed , and the tires rebalanced with external weights. When they dismantled the tires they found no balance beads had ever ben installed.

The tires now were starting to get flst spots. They rebalanced them with weights, with one tire needing over 12 ozs. The other 3 needed around 8 ozs. each. Even with the tires now balanced the flat spots made the ride terrible. We ended up replacing them with only 30,000 miles on them. We could have probably gotten double the mileage from them had they been balanced when new.

They tossed bags of balance beads in all SIX on my coach. Rides nice.

DFord wrote:
If you put that **** in your tires, be sure to let anyone that works on that tire assembly know in the future before they do anything to it. It can make problems for them if you don't.

You'll need filters on your valve stems to keep it out or your tire gauge.

Not true in all cases. The filters in the stem comes from using powder. I have used Dynabeads in my last 3 sets of tires. They are sized bigger than the stems, they ride fine, nice and smooth, and other than sticking them in when the tire is mounted on the rim, nothing else is required.

Those large tires seem to turn so slow I am surprised they even need balancing.
Maybe about 500 rpm is all they are turning at 60 mph.

If you put that **** in your tires, be sure to let anyone that works on that tire assembly know in the future before they do anything to it. It can make problems for them if you don't.

You'll need filters on your valve stems to keep it out or your tire gauge.