I have seriously been considering buying my own wheel weights. The Hoffman power weights are super easy to remove. Pull the whole strip at once.
Right Way to Road Force Balance?
- Thread starter panthermike
- Start date
Yes, GM required the numbers for warranty and we printed off a copy for the customers WO.
Brand new freshly mounted tires can't really be road forced. You have to drive them around for a few days first. During shipping and handling they aren't in their intended shape supported by air so road forcing a brand new tire isn't guaranteed to be accurate
You should try that with factory GM stick on weights... especially when it's cold out... I also like those style stick on weights
Sometimes its just the tire itself. The dudes could balance 3 but 1 was out of round, so he just did his best, it was on the front.
Tell me where I can find this guy near me:
It's always the tire itself. If it wasn't, regular spin balance would work just fine.
There is definately a right way to Road Force match balance a wheel/tire, but as it's been said, will the tech take the time to do it? I'm fortunate enough to have worked for a short time a my local VW dealer and know all the service folks, and they know me. None have an issue with me doing my own tire changes on a slow Saturday, and the shop has the latest Hunter machines. I just changed tires on my son's car and did Road Force match balancing, much like the guy in the video. All 4 of his wheels are very slightly out of round, but didn't have the time to get them straightened. Get initial readings on RF machine with bare wheels and mark high/low spots. Mount the tires (Pirelli P Zero AS+3s this time around) and RF. Find high/low spots again and mark them. Break the bead and rotate the tire to match up high to low and RF again. Repeat if RF was too high (only 2 were). Came out with 7, 12, 13 and 18 lb. and no wheel/tire took more than 25gr. of weight. Took me a bit of time, and some sweat equity, but even with the slightly bent wheels, it runs very smooth.
Road force match mounting works best with "slightly bent" wheels, and is not effective with "perfectly round" wheels.
Truck is back in this morning to install Hub rings; hoping for the best!
Much to my surprise and delight, the hub rings seemed to have done the trick.
So you're saying the problem was the wheel wasn't centered on the axle.
It appears so. Tire and wheels off the truck multiple times with the same issue. But now it is gone. I will say there is a pretty large size difference, 77.8 mm hub and 106.1 mm opening in the center bore of wheel.
So I’ve got two sets of factory rims for my 18 rogue. One set has continental cross contacts that were installed on rims out of the box, road forced and perfect no matter the speed. My other set came on the car new and outside of a scratch here and there and some marks from taking the lugs on and off are very pristine considering they have 110k on them. I just had pro contacts installed @ Walmart and like the tires before them, have a vibration @80mph on newly paved roads. I’ve got an appointment @ Belle tire today to have them road forced. There’s no curb rash and the cars never hit anything more than the occasional Ohio pothole. My control arms/ball joints are original but the outer tie rods are new. I was running the new rims prior to the pro contacts and no shimmy at any speed. Switched to the original wheels with new tires and the vibrations back. This is very frustrating. The guy at Belle tire who does the road force machine has been doing it for over 10yrs. I’ll report back how this goes. I’d lean towards a bad tire, possible rim if there wasn’t a previous pattern and or I could see some defect in the wheel.
@panthermike - so is this the tundra in your sig? Are the lug nuts acorn, conical or flat? I know Toyota oem is flat while most aftermarket rims are conical or acorn? This is really cool information that the centering rings resolved it. There are plenty of folks who say that conical or acorn lugs will self-center the wheel.
No actually, this was a Titan that I had purchased just 4 months ago. There was a lot of things I didn't like about it, mostly to do with the modifications. Ended up getting rid of it a month ago and somehow broke even on the Tundra.
I believe they were flat lugs but I can't say for sure. I was pretty amazed at the difference the hub rings made though.
The problem with this is they generally just make up a number. I've had to ask for photos of the computer screen in the past and printouts to accompany the work order. It's all black magic stuff in the end.I think I'm going to bring it in tomorrow and have them force match. I will for sure ask them to write these values down. To be fair, I think the majority of people would not even notice. But us here do notice, it's only right around the 70mph area (which is where i'm at mostly on the interstate). I like a smooth ride and these bad boys were $$$. I feel like if the Westlakes on my Wife's Mazda can be balanced well at walmart, a Michelin certainly can on a RF
Not entirely true. My understanding is that the machine is actually operator dependent. It can be screwed up just the same as an oil change at the same dealership - which happens often.
Google around for the manual to one of these machines, they are not for the faint of heart.
Haha wow I never even thought of that, but makes perfect sense.
The HMI on the ones at my local Discount Tire look like this. There pretty intuitive.
Possibly there are older or less feature rich versions that are harder?
What's intuitive about this? Here's the manual for their premier Elite model. The same people that forget to torque your oil drain plug are the same people operating this machine. I've got three college degrees and this hurts my head to look at
P.S. - the experience at my local DT is that they won't use the Hunter machine unless you explicitly ask them, and even then it's impossible to know if they did unless you have the time to sit around and watch. And based on my experience with a local shop that actually takes the time to do this right, that can take a few hours at least.
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