The force match isn’t always right. You can start at an unacceptable road force, it’ll tell you where to move the tire after checking rim runout.
Ok, move the tire (at least 5 minutes of work, if you’re doing this on tires that weren’t just mounted, maybe a minimum of 10 minutes to deflate, break beads, lube beads so you can actually turn the tire on the wheel).
Re-inflate and seat bead (usually no problem, but sometimes it is, sometimes you need the cheetah bead blaster, a whole ‘nother pain in the rear)
Put them on the balancer, recheck road force. Guess what, you moved it perfect and matched where it said to, but now your road force is worse. This happens more often than you’d like to believe. Or, you did all that work, and your road force was supposed to reduce to an acceptable level (I think we used 14 or so lbs for passenger tires, but I’ve been away from the real repair world for 10 years now) after moving the tire, you still aren’t at an acceptable level.
In both cases, the machine is still telling you that you can force match and get acceptable results. So you hustle to do it again. This time should be easier, but it still sucks.
Maybe it’ll actually be acceptable this time, usually it isn’t. If it doesn’t get to an acceptable level the first move, you’re usually chasing your tail and it never gets to an acceptable level.
You are a flat rate tech who is getting paid about 1 hour to mount and balance 4 tires.
- You had to go find the car
- bring it in
- lift it
- you should be shaking it down before you remove the wheels to make sure its suspension and steering are good
- removing the wheels
- bringing them to the tire area
- going to parts department and getting your tires
- bringing them to the tire room
- dismounting / valve stems if replaceable / and mounting
- I always calibrated the balancer before balancing, as about 20 of us used the equipment, I didn’t trust that someone didn’t jolt it or let tires fly into it and throw it off a bit.
- balancing and potentially adjusting tire positions based on road force results
- placing wheel weights and balancing
- putting old tires in storage
- moving tires and wheels back to the vehicle
- installing them
- putting the vehicle down
- test driving it
- parking it
- recording your work on the repair order
We got paid 1.2 hours for 4 tires. Customers couldn’t understand being charged more when the balancer wanted us ti adjust road force. They also couldn’t understand paying more than the listed “menu” price to have a vibration addressed by road force balancing tires. They can see it costs “$xx” to install 4 tires, in anyone’s head, the tires are already installed, so a road force balance should be less than simply installing tires, right?
Just giving you a glimpse as to why it’s a pain to get even a good tech to want to do a good job on tires. 90% of customers won’t notice, so they let it fly and hope it doesn’t come back. We never even had the roller come down and apply road force to 95% of tire jobs if I had to guess.