Road tires - bead balancing vs traditional weights?

[pvkj454]

Balance beads work great on my F750 with 22.5s. They did not work on my K30 dually with 14 ply 19.5s. The bead manufacturer said that the truck was too light for the medium duty tires and they bounce up faster than the weight of the truck pushes them back down.

 

[Kyle]

Centramatics worked fair on my daily 2500, last set of tires went 60k

last set of Toyo open county at for me , no grip in the rain, I'm back on Nitto g2

Wheel Balancers for many trucks, buses, trailers, and motorcycles from Centramatic

Centramatic is an industry leader in wheel balancing technology!

www.centramatic.com

Oh I met president of that company. He’s a really solid good guy. I asked him Once how it worked and he showed me. Seemed really effective for big truck tires.

 

[billybob_81067]

I've run the dynamic balancing beads and steel BB's. Hell even had some golf balls in some old bias ply hummer tires.

Here lately with new Chinese tires off e-bay I've just been putting the yellow dot on the valve stem and running no weight. Haven't had any imbalance issues yet.

 

[Fuzzydog]

Can you explain why beads make more sense than rim weights?

I submit exhibit #1. I told no less than 4 people at this tire shop that I want bead balanced. Told them the rims are hard to find now and I don't want any lead weights hammered on to them. And they couldn't even do the job right and line up the weights properly.

 

[ExWrench]

Beads can be great for radial imbalance, but can't do shit about axial imbalance (especially on wider tires). Coffee and pasta from the last iteration of this thread:
_________________________________________________________________________________

Here's my experience with beads, ignore it as you see fit

12-28-2013, 11:09 PM



The 2007 Tacoma was my first time phookin' around with airsoft balancing, and I went back to traditional balancing when I sold it.
I put 10 oz. of .20 gram airsoft pellets/beads/BBs in each of the 255/85R16 (~33.5x10.5-16) BFG MT KM tires on the Taco.
.
1. 20% of the time, it was PERFECT!
2. 20% of the time, it was HORRIBLE!
3. 60% of the time, it was OK



A little insight into how the BBs act:

The BBs fall down inside the tire until about 25-30 MPH, where they transition to staying spread out against the inside of the tread.
The BBs stay flung out against the inside of the tread until you come to a stop (or close to it).

If I hit the transition speed in the Taco while going through a corner (like a curved freeway on-ramp), I would have a horribly unbalanced tire.
Occasionally, the beads would not redistribute properly after hitting an odd bump on the freeway and I would have a horribly unbalanced tire.
Either of the two scenarios above would require me to pull over and stop to regain good balance, unless I lucked out and hit a bump right to clear it up.

On the Jeep, I put 8 oz. of .20 gram BBs and 6 oz. of propylene glycol inside when I mounted the tires on the beadlocks.
Later, while resolving death wobble and shimmy issues, I added 8 oz. of distilled water through the valve stems.

This brought me up to 22 oz. of dynamic balancing media in each tire, and the last 8 oz. did not make a huge difference.

1. 20% of the time, it is GOOD to perfect
2. 20% of the time, it is BAD (but not horrible)
3. 60% of the time, it is OK to good


The addition of propylene glycol got rid of the Taco's problem of the beads requiring a ridiculous level of intervention on my part to get unfooked sometimes.
I do not worry about the transition point with my current setup, so the glycol is an effective lubricant (and anti-freeze).
However, the BBs have a worse axial imbalance on average in the 12.5" tires on 10" rims on my JK than they did in the 10.5" on 8" rims on the Taco.

In summary:

• Adding lube to the BBs totally helps them correct for any RADIAL imbalance more quickly and accurately.
• Narrower rims and tires are the only way to minimize AXIAL imbalance - the BBs cannot compensate for that.
• A tall, narrow tire on a narrow rim would probably balance almost perfectly using BBs, glycol, and water.
• Dynamic media balancing is great a lot of the time, but not all of the time, and sometimes it just sucks.

This coming week, I plan to pull the tires, vacuum and clean out all of the balancing media, and check the rims for axial and radial runout.
I believe that Trail Ready did a good job but I never checked the rims for machining accuracy, so it's time to verify that TR earned the faith I have in them.
If and when the rims pass my inspection, I will reassemble the tires and static balance them using a bubble balancer and tape weights.

I know that my MTR/Ks have some radial runout, and I changed rims when the tires had 15k on them, so they bring a bit to the shimmy party.
However, I had no major problems before I moved the tires over to my beadlock rims.
I had an immediate onset of death wobble on the shakedown run of my new rim/tire combination.

The death wobble itself was the result of a blown out flex joint in my front lower control arm, but the onset was from the new chassis dynamics.
Specifically, I now had my tires on wider rims with less backspacing. This provided the leverage to bring the shimmy to instigate the wobble.

Shit, it's late - time to bail on this. I'll get into the rest of that crap later.

---

Source: ExWrench's Oddball Mods + Sneaky Stretch

 

[non-OP]

I ran beads with my bias ply 37" creepy crawlers on steel double beadlocks with custom rock rings (that were not symmetrical, so impacted balance) and the truck drove great even up to 75 mph.