If you have ever been in a situation where your wheels started to wobble, you know how stupid and strange that feeling is. It is not a nice feeling when your wheels begin to wobble, especially at higher speeds. To prevent this from happening, you need to balance your motorcycle tires correctly, and in this article, we will show you how it needs to be done.
So how do you balance motorcycle tires? You need to prepare the tires and the balancer. Once you have the balancer prepared and adjusted, clean your rims so you can glue the weights. Rotate the tire and add weights to the spots that the balancer determines. After you have placed enough weights on specific spots, your tire will be balanced.
Continue reading as we will get more in detail on the process of balancing motorcycle tires and everything related to it. Stay with us, and let’s get started.
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How to Balance Motorcycle Tires?
Motorcycle tires need to be perfectly balanced for you to feel that nice smooth ride, and to do so, you need to keep your tires in balance. If you change your tires on your own, you will need to balance them, and learning how to do it yourself will be very useful.
The nice thing about balancing your moto tires is that it is easy to perform, and you don’t need many tools to do it. There are two techniques used for balancing your tires:
- Static Balancing: This technique uses gravity for finding heavy spots on your motorcycle wheel, and that way, you can determine where you need to place weights to get your tire in balance.
- Dynamic Balancing: This technique is familiar to most people since most riders go to mechanics who have a dynamic balancing machine that spins the tire at high speeds to find the perfect balance.
In this article, we will cover how to balance your motorcycle tire using the “Static balancing” technique because “Dynamic balancing” will only be used by mechanics who own a dynamic balancing machine, as I mentioned earlier.
So let’s get started.
To balance your motorcycle tires, you will need a static balancer, a pretty simple device made of a frame, and a horizontal shaft where you put your wheel and spin it to determine where you need to put weights. This static balancer costs around $100 and will come in handy if you change your tires frequently.
Advice: Since my friends and I are stunt riders, we change our tires more than 10 times a year. The reason for that many tire changes is that we do a lot of tricks and tire burnout, which significantly decreases tire lifespan, which is why we need to know how to balance and change our tires by ourselves.
If you are a stunt rider who changes his tires frequently or just wants to learn how to do it so you can do it on your own, then this is the perfect article for you where I will explain everything you need to know.
A static balance is a universal fit tool made from a shaft with a small diameter with two cones placed in the axle sleeve on both sides of the wheel. After you lock down the cones to the shaft using a set screw, your motorcycle wheel is centered on the shaft and prepared for balancing.
If you notice that your tire has been pierced, you will need to patch it, and to do so, click on this link that will guide you through the step-by-step process on How to Fix both Tubeless and Tube-Type Tires.
Motorcycle wheels are getting balanced after installing a new set of tires on them, and I will assume that your wheel is already off your bike, and you can start with balancing. If not, you will need to take off the wheel, change the new tires, and begin the balancing process.
Click on this link to learn How to Change Motorcycle Tires.
Step 1: Prepare the Balancer
Put your balancer on a stable surface and make sure that the shaft is flat and at a balanced level. The standard magnetic 9-inch level makes the balancing process much easier to perform.
Step 2: Adjust the Balancer
Before you slide the shaft through the axle sleeve on your motorcycle wheel, you need to take one of the cones from the balancer’s shaft. After doing so, slide the cone back to the shaft, and you need to slide the narrow end first.
Tighten the set screw firmly, so it gets locked in place. You need to make sure that both cones fit inside the axle sleeve. If the cones don’t fit inside the axle sleeve, your wheel won’t be centered on the balancer shaft, which can lead to inaccurate balancing.
Step 3: Clean the Rim
Use a good degreaser to wipe down and clean the rim. Cleaning the rim is a very important task to do, and there are two reasons:
- If you use adhesive weights for your wheels, the rim needs to be cleaned for the weights to stick well and not fall off.
- You don’t want to be thrown out of balance because of grease sediment on your rim.
You need to remove any weights left from the previous balancing, so your rim is perfectly cleaned and ready for new weights. Brake cleaner is an ideal cleanser for your rim, and it will clean away any grease, dirt, or grime.
Step 4: Spin the Tire
In this step, you need to spin your tire slowly and leave it to stop on its own. What will be done is that the heaviest part of the tire will gravitate to the downside, and you will use a piece of colored tape and put it on this spot on your motorcycle rim.
What you can learn from this wheel position is next. If your wheel’s heaviest point is on the downside, this means that the lightest point of your wheel is at the highest point. This also means that you need to put weights on the top of the wheel, across on the opposite side of the wheel’s heaviest point.
The color tape will make it easier to know the heaviest position on your wheel. If your rim is non-spoked, the best weights to be used are the adhesive-backed type because you only need to stick them to your rim.
Another great thing about these weights is that they are mostly cheap and can be easily placed on your rim. They can also be placed on both sides of your rim. If you have spoked rims, you can use spoke weights that can be placed with a set screw or with a crimp to the spokes.
The only downside of the spoke weights is that they are a little bit more expensive compared to the adhesive-backed weights, but their upside is that they can be reused and they will stick much better to your tire, and because of that, there is a slight chance that they will fall off your rims.
Step 5: Add Weights
You need to add a few ounces of weight to the light part of your tire. Use tape to hold adhesive–backed weights in place temporarily until you don’t get the entire wheel balanced. You can cut adhesive-backed weights to the wanted weight because they come in strips.
On the other hand, spoke wheel weights can be found in different weights, and you can stack them depending on how much weight you need to put.
Step 6: Balance the Tire
You need to spin the tire as long as the heaviest and the lightest parts are the same distance from the work surface. Spin the wheel gently and leave it to return to its natural position, and once again, the heaviest part comes to the downside.
It will mostly be the exact spot you previously determined as the heaviest spot, which means that you need to add extra weight to the lightest part. However, if the part of the wheel where you placed another weight comes to the lowest point, this will signal that you placed too much weight and you need to remove some weight.
Tip: Take a double-stick tape and use it during this step because it will make this step much easier and faster since you won’t need to use the glue on your weights until you determine the final spots where the weights need to be glued.
Step 7: Repeat Until Perfect
In this step, you need to repeat everything from Step 6 as long as the wheel rotates. Once it stops spinning on its own, it means that you perfectly balanced your tire. A perfectly balanced tire needs to remain still after you release it because there are no heavier parts that would pull and rotate the wheel around.
Tip: Rotate and release the wheel a couple more times once you have balanced it just to check it out. Use tape to help you spot any irregularities much easier. Release your wheel at the 3:00, 6:00, 9:00, and 12:00 spots since it will give you the best result.
Step 8: Finishing
If you have spoked rims, this means that you have just finished your balancing, and you can take the wheel from the balancer. On the other hand, if you use adhesive-backed weights, take a piece of tape and place it on the edge of the weights line, and after that, you can remove the tape that holds the weights temporarily glued to these spots.
Note: You need to know that perfectly balancing your wheels can sometimes be a challenging task since wheel weights come in fixed sizes, and these weights may be too large than required for your spot on the wheel.
Conclusion
If you are a big motorcycle lover and you just like everything that comes with your bike and is somehow related to it, I think that you will love to balance your tires by yourself. I hope this article has helped you a lot and all of the pictures above since these pictures were taken on last tire balancing.