I'm sure balancing oversize tire/wheel combos has been covered ad nausium on the forum, but a few searches didn't turn up any specific threads. I'm wondering about the dynamic balancers vs more traditional weight balancing. Any threads to send me to?

Chris

 

Actually it hasn't been covered that much. Treadwright tire co recommends static balancing but someone with probably chime in that has experience with it.

 

There are ceramic or polymer micro beads, e.g. Dynabeads, purpose-designed for that application. The cheaper solution is to use some of the larger size airsoft pellets or buckshot, the latter perhaps being more suited to a rig that spends most of its time offroad. The trick is putting enough in to get the dynamic balance to work, but not add unnecessary weight. The other disadvantage is that until your rig gets up to e.g. 50 mph, there may not be enough centrifugal force to spin the media into position. And when one's speed drops below e.g. 50 mph, the media starts to drop back to the bottom. Depending on how loud your tires & the rest of the truck are, you may be able to hear the media spinning into position & dropping back to the bottom.

I toyed with the idea of experimenting with using media, and did a bunch of research, but didn't reach any definitive conclusion. Many report it works great, while many also report it didn't work for them (perhaps they didn't use enough weight per tire, or the right kind of media that doesn't clump, or the speeds they often drive at isn't fast enough for the media to spin into position?). Anyway, in the end I just decided to get my 37" tires static balanced the old-fashioned way, and have been happy with minimal vibration at speed.

 

get the tires balanced as best as possible using convential wieghts. I prefer the hidden "stick on" type

then grab a 4-8 oz bag of airsoft pellets. the bigger the tire, the more pellets you need.

my 35's are pretty decent, but they have a problem every now and then. when I rotate them next, I'll probably break a bead on each tire and dump in a 4oz bag into each one.


as far as speed, once the tire starts rolling at any appreciable speed, the pellets will automatically distribute due to centrifugal force. 5+ mph will do the trick. you use airsoft pellets since they are plastic and are virtually noiseless. If you use metal BB's, then you will get alot of noise

 

I used airsoft BB's in out expedition with 35's 8oz in each tire worked great and always stayed balanced

 

I have used the airsoft in my Jeep tires. The formula we use is: 1oz of airsoft/10# of tire + 2 oz

Ie...70# tire would get 9oz of airsoft.