Balancing off-road tires

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labsy
Posts: 289
Joined: Sun Nov 02, 2014 9:26 am

Balancing off-road tires

Postby labsy » Wed Nov 18, 2015 4:39 pm

Hi guyz,

I've just returned from tire service where we tried to balance out my 32'' Duratracs, but with low success rate. Not any of tires could be balanced to zero and we put really A LOT of wights on the wheel.
By A LOT I mean a lot - on average each wheel had 2 lines of weights over 170g (5 oz.) and we simply could not put any more, as it did not balance tire out. We tried turning the tire on wheel by 1/4 of turn, rebalancing again and always the same story for all 5 wheels.

I've read about other methods of balancing:
- beadlock counterweight, which does not apply to my budget
- some small air balls, called BBs
- liquid balancing with antifreeze

What's the best method of balancing out bigger tires? I have 32's, which are among smallest off-road tires, so how do others cope with balancing problem?


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Touchdown
Posts: 358
Joined: Sat Feb 04, 2012 2:45 pm
Location: Dallas Area

Postby Touchdown » Wed Nov 18, 2015 11:13 pm

I'm having a problem balancing my Duratracs as well.
When did you buy yours?

I purchased mine a few months ago and was wondering if it might have been a bad batch from Good Year. :x

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labsy
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Postby labsy » Thu Nov 19, 2015 1:54 am

I thought the same for my 4 Duratracs from last year. But just 2 weeks ago I bought 1 new from the new production batch (I was waiting more than 3 months for the tire, as they were not available in Europe)....and the same balancing story with the new one.

So I guess it's all the same, for Duratracs as probably for some other rubbers with more aggressive thread pattern. :?

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Touchdown
Posts: 358
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Location: Dallas Area

Postby Touchdown » Mon Nov 23, 2015 11:53 pm

OK, so 4WheelParts finally replaced 4 of them and put the one good one i had on as the spare.
It's a whole lot better and they balanced with a lot less weight too!

I guess it was a bad batch in my case.

I would have whomever put your tires on to replace them under warranty!!

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labsy
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Postby labsy » Sun Jan 03, 2016 4:56 pm

I hope it's not the tires.

I've put Counteract Balancing beads into front pair of tires while leaving weights on and shaking almost gone. Maybe at higher HW speeds a bit of shaking was still present, but that depends on road.

Then I made a huge mistake.
Merchant where I bought Counteract balancing beads said I need to take balancing weights OFF so I did.
Woooa what a shaking experinece! Vehicle now shakes so much it's hard to hold steering wheel steady above some speed, so my max. until I sort it out is 50 mph.

Maybe balancing beads are good, but it's quite hard to determine the right amount to put in each tire. You need to take wheel off, deflate, pry one side out to get access to tire guts, then either add some beads or vacuum them out and go for test ride.
Too complicated for testing, so I am going back to classic weights balancing.

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Touchdown
Posts: 358
Joined: Sat Feb 04, 2012 2:45 pm
Location: Dallas Area

Postby Touchdown » Mon Jan 18, 2016 8:41 pm

That happened to me as well...

I finally went back to the classic weights after the new tires were balanced right. But I did find out later that I can add 4 oz of the beads to the existing tires with weights and "supposedly" it'll make it better.

The new tires are a million times better than the bad batch that was on there.
BUT they are not perfect and I'm still debating if I should add the 4 oz to each tire.

Decisions...decisions...


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