Staying Well Balanced
How often do you need to balance your HMV’s tires? If you never drove it anywhere, the answer would be once — when they were installed on the rims. However, most HMVs that are not pure show vehicles are driven, and things happen while driving that cause their wheels to become unbalanced. The first symptom is usually vibration when cruising at highway speeds. Wheels out of balance can also cause the dreaded front end shimmy. While almost all wheels (meaning rims) leave the factory perfectly balanced, almost all tires, no matter how costly, have a heavy spot. This causes the tire to bounce when it rolls down the road, and this bouncing increases in intensity with speed. Adding a weight equal to the heavy spot on the opposite side of the wheel (rim) will balance the tire so it doesn’t bounce. This is called static balancing, and is usually done on a simple stand with a bubble level.
Years ago, static balancing was state-of-the-art. Static balancing was also sometimes done by simply jacking a vehicle’s wheel off the ground and checking where the wheel came to rest when allowed to turn freely. Then, weights were added to the opposite side until the wheel would rest at any point. Primitive, but it usually worked well enough for narrow tires on vehicles that didn’t travel much
