How wheels were balanced in the 60s

[dern]

A great video on such a cool old wheel balancing tool...

[Taipan]

We had one where I worked. Also had a static one where you laid the wheel horizontally on an adjustable plate which had a spirit level style bubble in the middle. You just added the lightest weights you could until the bubble was central!

[Skub]

Very cool.

[mangocrazy]

What a clever machine! Although the operator did need to know what they were doing - rather more so than on a modern machine I'd guess.

[Yorick]

I got bored in 2 minutes

[ChrisW]

Fascinating. To be honest the first couple of minutes are dull but the paper/pencil method is genius!

[JackyJoll]

I got bored in 2 minutes

Did anyone bring sweets?

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

I used on of them in the 80s, and the bubble thing Taipan used.

[roadster]

Something was missing from that technique, namely the correction of dynamic imbalance which needs to know which side to place the weights. Static balance can be perfectly achieved by placing all the weights on one side ( or in the middle if that's possible) and it doesn't need the wheel to be spun. This machine detects dynamic imbalance but the operator didn't explain how the machine indicates on which side the dynamic correction weight needs to be placed. This could have something to do with the ability to spin the wheel in either direction. In general bike wheels only need static balancing unless they are very wide.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Do normal modern wheel balancers tell you which side to stick it on?

I've balanced (well, arranged for someone else to balance!) loads and loads of things. Spent a lot of my career working on prop shafts, high speed motors, fancy flywheels etc. so I've specced and done all sorts of balancing. I always assumed most road tyres/wheels are just single plane balanced? Anyone know?

[Le_Fromage_Grande]

From memory, the old wheel balancers like the one in the video didn't tell you what side of the wheel to put the weight on, but I don't think it mattered with skinny 60s and 70s car tyres, where I worked we also had a newer wheel balancer that did tell you which side to put the weight on, this was in 1984.

[David]

Much more impressively ( oi think) when I worked at Barlow Motors in Wolverhampton in the late 70's w had a 4 wheel alignment system based on projectors clipped to each wheel with a white board affair at the blunt end. A garden of possible errors was obvious, though the workshop foreman thought it was brilliant.....the same fellow that whilst working on a Range Rover gear box with me picked up my telescopic magnetic picky up thingy and launched my snap on centre punch into the depths of said gear box and blamed me. Some naughty words were side on both sides of the transmission tunnel.

[roadster]

Do normal modern wheel balancers tell you which side to stick it on?

I've balanced (well, arranged for someone else to balance!) loads and loads of things. Spent a lot of my career working on prop shafts, high speed motors, fancy flywheels etc. so I've specced and done all sorts of balancing. I always assumed most road tyres/wheels are just single plane balanced? Anyone know?

Bikes don't generally need dynamic balancing because the wheel is narrow. Proper car balancers definitely do need dynamic balancing but in my experience operators don't always understand this. Latest machines don't rely on operator skill and just tell the operator exactly where to place the weights.
Here is a page from the manual of a professional machine

Clipboard-1.jpg (635.07 KiB) Viewed 476 times

When the wheel is dynamically balanced it shows the operator which side to place the weights ( inner plane or outer plane). Elsewhere the manual also says that static balancing should be selected for motorcycle wheels.

There is still a problem with balancing a new tyre because its shape will change when it has been through a few heat cycles. In an ideal world tyres should be balanced after about 100 miles of use.