Thread: Balance
View Single Post
Old 03-13-2024, 11:43 AM   #5
rotorwrench
Senior Member
 
rotorwrench's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2010
Location: San Antonio, Texas
Posts: 16,484
Default Re: Balance

Sponsored Links (Register now to hide all advertisements)
To check front rotating assemblies, a person can carefully jack the car for best wheel vertical plane. If the wheel assembly has a heavy side, it will always rotate toward gravity until it stops. That is the heavy side on the bottom. A person can add weight in some fashion to the top or opposite side of the heavy point until the wheel assembly will no longer rotate when placed in any position. This is as good as any way to static balance a rotating assembly. The only bad thing is that it doesn't work so well on the rear end due to drive train rotating friction.

Rim track is also important. A wheel assembly can be rotated while using a fixed pointer very near the edge of the rim to see if the rim is deformed or bent. Usually the track can be checked visually but even a small amount of deviation can be problematic with increased speed of rotation. This leads to an excessive side to side motion. If steering linkages are loose then that will just make the movement of things more obvious and can lead to a wobble.

The problem may also be tire carcass related. If the rims are removable then they can be removed and rolled by hand on a flat smooth surface. if they roll straight and fairy even then the tire is good. If they wobble and flop over then the tire is bad. Most death wobble situations can be traced to a bad tire. Unfortunately, with non demountable type wheel assemblies, it is more difficult to perform this test.

Look for a front end alignment shop that still uses a balance system that checks the balance on the car by rotating the wheels off the ground and attaching a balance sensor to detect any imbalance and the clock angle of that imbalance in order to attach weights for correction. Tire shops generally don't have this equipment but some front end alignment shops still do.
rotorwrench is offline   Reply With Quote