Thursday, December 12, 2013

Balancing tires with air soft BB's revisited.

I said in my previous post that I would do an update on how the air soft BB's worked for balancing my tires on the bug so here it is. They work awesome! I have felt no vibrations whatsoever. I am now 100 percent convinced that they work and they work well. I am going to run them in all the tires on my bugs. If you missed my first post on the subject I will give you a rundown on what I did. I bought a bottle of air soft BB's and separated them into bags of 3.5 ounces each as you can see here. I got 10 bags out of 1 bottle so I have 2 1/2 cars worth of beads.
 I used Airsplat BB's because they seemed like the best quality. Make sure you get the heavy (.20 g) ones. I think I payed 20 bucks for this bottle so it comes out to cost 2 dollars a tire for balancing. That's a lot cheaper than going to a store to have them do it if you have the capability to mount tires.
 These are the tires and wheels I put them in. I poured them in right before I seated the beads onto the rims. These tires are 215/75/15's. I thought I might have to adjust the amount of beads I put in the tires but I have had absolutely no vibrations so 3.5 ounces works perfectly in this setup.
 The last storm we had I took the bug out and did some doughnuts with my boys. The beauty of having beads is that it will balance your wheels perfect every time no matter what happens to your wheels.
 As you can see here, this might of been a problem with regular tire weights on the wheels. In my case I didn't even know snow was packed in like this. I had a Honda CRX once that I did doughnuts in. It had packed snow on the wheels like this. When I went to go to work the next morning I almost got thrown off the freeway because the wheels were so off balance. I actually thought I had bent a wheel or something because it shook so bad. When the snow melted it drove just fine. I wouldn't of had that problem if I had beads in those tires. Ha Ha.
So, I recommend beads for balancing. I have read that they aren't as good in low profile tires and I am going to keep running regular weights on Dixie's van but if you are running bigger tires on a truck or change tires a lot like I do on my bugs this works great. It's also good if you run in the mud because your tires will balance themselves no matter how much mud is on them. This gets 2 big thumbs up from me.

1 comment:

Dixie Olson said...

Mud or snow you mean, right?