fredz43 said:
...just as some say that not balancing has worked for them. Makes me wonder how a rider could tell if a tire were out of balance with the suspension components absorbing any small vibration type bumps while riding. How does one determine which bumps are road irregularities and which are induced by tire imbalance. I know a severely imbalanced tire will cause severe vibrations, but not one that is only an ounce or 2 out.
Just my natural cynical personality, I guess, but I went back to normal balancing.
thats because a small imbalance will make sweet F A difference to a bike or cause vibration, think about it like this if you had a perfectly balanced tyre and then you get a rock stuck in the tread or pickup a screw or a nail, your tyre is now no longer balanced and you would never know.
If the tyre makes no perceivable vibration then its not going to bother the bike or the rider so why bother balancing it? When I started changing my own tyres I bought all the gear including a static balancer, but then i started getting told by a bunch of people its not necessary. I tested this myself by sticking a strip of tyre weights to the rim to deliberately unbalance the tyre and it took a whole strip to actually feel a difference at highway speed. if a wheel was that unbalanced I'd be looking for damage to the rim or suspecting a defective tyre.
The other issue is that the static balances people use for motorcycle rims are nothing like the machines used for car rims, you could never get the tyre perfectly balanced due to the amount of friction between the axle and bearings that these balances employ as opposed to the automotive balancers that spin the tyre up and measure the vibration.
I'd also say each to their own, if people want to balance motorcycle tyres its not going to do any harm so knock yourself out. My experience though is that with 3 bikes and chewing through tyres every few thousand km's over about a decade I have never experienced any unusual vibration or handling nor had problems with axles, bearings or suspension components wearing prematurely. and the guys who told me not to worry about it are track junkies who chew through tyres pretty regularly and do some high speeds.