Using a Bubble-Type Wheel Balancer
Tires should be checked for balance, and custom wheels should be aligned regularly to ensure that your vehicle handles properly and safely. If either the balance or the alignment is off, not only may you have problems handling your vehicle, expensive tires on your custom truck wheels will begin to wear unevenly, thus creating situations where your tires may blow out, or at the very least cause you the expense of needing to replace them sooner than necessary. The bubble-balancer is one of the oldest tire balancers still in use today, and it remains a very effective way to check the installation of tires.
Once you have replaced a tire that has been repaired, and is mounted on the rim, inflate it to the right pressure, and then double check it to make certain that is properly inflated. If the pressure is not correct, then balancing the tire will not be possible. Take off the existing weights, as they would interfere with correctly balancing the tire now. You lock the bubble wheel balancer into position and place the wheel into the floating device.
The side of the tire that faces out, the street view side, should be turned upwards. Once you unlock the bubble balancer, you will be able to come to a position wherein you will find a fixed and correct reading. Your cooper tire should be floating in a level state. Now is the time to look at the bubble, which should be visible in the middle of the window of the floating hub. This is much like the bubble that floats in the middle of a level that is used in the construction of houses.
You will know that your tire is properly balanced when the bubble sits at dead center of the window. If this is not happening at first, place weights on your wheels until you reach a proper balance. Place them along the rim, one at a time, slowly increasing the weights until you find the bubble in the middle. Once you have this achieved, you can now mount your balanced tire onto your vehicle, and know that you will be safe, and that your tires will have an increased lifetime on the road.
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