Re: ‘34 tire balance
I balanced tires for 30-year's and there never were adapters back then during the 1970s-1990s, just different size cones to fit in the center holes.
When you stick a cone in the center of a rim and spin the tire you can easily see if the wheel is not centered. Can I see within thousandths of an inch, no, but its close enough. You can take a steel rim and a tire, mount it with a cone on a computerized spin balancer. Perfectly balance the tire to a 0.00 ounce reading. Take a little 1/4 ounce weight and stick it on there and that machine will ask for a 1/4 ounce weight directly opposite the other weight. That's how you know if the balancer is still accurate. When I bolted them on the vehicles, from tiny cars to 1-ton trucks they went on down the road nice and smooth. I balanced thousands of tires using a "front cone" balancer.
Before the spin balancer we had a bubble balancer. That old balancer had been there from the 1950s or 1960s. It was pretty accurate. A small amount of weigh added to the tire would move that bubble off of the center bullseye.
I bought a Snap-On computerized wheel balancer from my friend's, families Cadillac repair shop when it closed. All there is with the machine is cones to center the rims.
I don't believe these balancer adaptors your talking about apply to vehicles with steel rims that have decent size holes in the middle for a cone. Over on the '69-'70 Boss 302 website, guys were saying you needed an adaptor to balance the Magnum 500 rims. That could be true, because the hole in the center of the rim is something like 2 5/8". You don't have enough room to get a cone in there plus the shaft on the wheel balancer. What I think the problem is, is that some of these new aluminum wheels have very small diameter center holes so they need an adaptor to center the wheel on the balancer's shaft.
The way I feel about the old cars is I'm building an 87 year old Ford not a Hubble Telescope.
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