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Wheels and Tires:
What does it mean when my tires are imbalanced?
At highway speeds, it is not uncommon for your vehicle's wheels to rotate at 10 revolutions per second or more. At those speeds, it’s easy to see how important it is that the wheels are evenly balanced. But at any speed, even a slight wheel imbalance can have an adverse affect on vehicle handling and tire wear. In fact, wheel imbalance is one of the most common sources of wheel shimmy, steering wheel vibration and abnormal tire wear.
There are two types of wheel imbalance, static and dynamic.
Static imbalance
 Static imbalance is caused by the wheel's weight being distributed unevenly around the axle or spindle. Static imbalance can be thought of as having one portion of the tire being slightly heavier than the others. As a result, the tire rolls unevenly and has a tendency to slightly bounce while turning over the road surface. If your vehicle were raised on a lift and you were to turn the wheel by hand, you would notice how the wheel rotates unevenly, speeding up as the heavy side goes down and slowing as it reaches the top. While driving at high speeds, static imbalance has a tendency to cause the wheel to hop up and down.
Dynamic imbalance
 Dynamic imbalance includes the same sort of uneven weight distribution that occurs in static imbalance, but unlike static imbalance, the heavy portion of the tire is not found along the tire’s centerline but rather it is off to one side. As a result, the wheel not only has a tendency to hop up and down, as found with static imbalance, but also tends to wobble from side to side.
Wheel balancing
 A wheel-balancing machine is used to determine which part of the tire is heavy. The balancing machine not only tells the technician where the weight needs to be installed, but it also tells him how much weight to apply.
Once the problem area is located, lead weights are attached to the rim opposite the heavy area to even out weight distribution, allowing the wheel to turn smoothly. When the wheel is balanced, it rotates without a wobble or shimmy and is reinstalled on the vehicle. |
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