Wheel balance

Just put on dirt set from Forest. My front feels like its egg shaped! Do you guys have your wheels balanced? I'm running Mich AC-10's, no rimlock's. Either I can't feel the rear, or its OK, but the front bounces around quite a bit at say 40mph and up.

Ouch...it shouldn't be bouncing quite that bad, especially if you're not running a rim lock. You could try tossing some weights on there and see if it helps. I'm just hoping it's that and not the rim. I know one guy had a wonky rim, he sent t back and Forrest sent him out another one. He seems pretty good that way.

jlpred wrote:

Just put on dirt set from Forest. My front feels like its egg shaped! Do you guys have your wheels balanced? I'm running Mich AC-10's, no rimlock's. Either I can't feel the rear, or its OK, but the front bounces around quite a bit at say 40mph and up.

jlpred,

I have an X and put Shinko 244 17" knobbies on it front and rear. It shook like hell.

How could that be possible? I paid the motorcycle shop to balance the tires and they swore they checked them and the front was "only" 1 gram out and the rear was only 2 grams out... "I'd never feel it".

So having read that many (most?) motorcycle shops totally blow off balancing knobbies one way or the other, I bought a Marc Parnes static balancer for $105.

The tires were actually 43 grams and 63 grams out of balance. So the motorcycle shop was more than happy to take the money to do NOTHING.


I learned from some sources, not sure if true: If the tires have a round dot (rubber paint) placed on them by the manufacturer, they supposedly mean this:

A white or yellow dot inticates the light side of the tire. This should be aligned with the heavy area of the wheel; since this is usually not known, most people line the dot up with the valve stem expecting that to be the heavy area. If the tire has a RED dot, this indicates the HEAVY area of the tire and should go opposite the known or expected heavy area of the wheel.

Many tires have NO dots. Then ya' guess. If you have a real shaker, you might break down the tire and rotate it out of phase with where it was on the wheel by 1/4 turn. That may help with some weight or runout tolerance stack up.


While my bike was showing some "nominal" rim runout and quite a bit of front tire runout, balancing the tires made a HUGE difference with my situation. It went from very rough to very smooth. I considered the bike unrideable with the tires out of balance that far. Unknown if DynaBeads or RideOn TPS self balancing products could have corrected this level of imbalance or not. I can't prove it, but I suspect NOT.


How far a tire is out of balance may also be an indication of a cheap or poorly made tire. My Shinko 244's are very inexpensive, so I "bought" some of this problem with my cheapness.

Having said that and seen such arguments go both ways, other posters stated that they sometimes had big imbalances with $150 (each) aka very expensive tires, too.


So those are some mostly unconfirmed thoughts. Parnes was very friendly to deal with and shipped super fast. If there was one minor hassle, I had to remove 3 out of 4 wheel seals so they would not drag on the Parnes axle alignment cones for the balancer. No drag or near zero drag is very important for an accurate result.


There are reasons why Parnes' balancer is vastly superior to trying to balance a wheel on its OEM axle and OEM sealed bearings, but I've droned on long enough here and should shut up versus getting into that issue.


BigFeet