When is a Balanced Tire not Balanced

Sometimes you can’t win for trying.  I’m certainly not new to buying tires, but motorhome tires seem to be in a class by themselves.  First, they are BIG, at least in comparison to what I’ve bought before. And expensive.  When we first bought the present motorhome, it was clear that it needed new front tires so that wasn’t a surprise in itself.

I did my usual research (thank you Google) and figured out the one or two brands of tires that I wanted.  Since the rear tires were getting to the end of their useful life, but could go another year, the plan was to replace the two on front and the following year, the four on the rear.  OK.  So I got the best price I could for the two front tires.

Not the best of experiences waiting around while they swapped the tires, but OK.  Trouble was, they weren’t really well balanced, there was a noticeable bounce aroung 60 MPH which is around where I like to drive the beast.  I also was finding a lot of people singing the praises of a separate balance ring device made by Centramatics.  I thought that sounded like a really neat piece of techology, so I sprung for the balancers for the front and rear wheels.

When I got the rear tires mounted, I had them also mount the balancers on the front wheels.  It did not seem to help the out of balance condition at all.  I got the company on the phone and they said there were two common issues:  1)  any old weights should be removed and 2) on my axles, the small holes must be used to mount the balancers.  I was already back at the tire store and confirmed with them that the old weights were off and the small holes were used.

I stopped at Centramatics on the way north after that (this was last August) and had them look at the coach.  They pulled all four wheels and the devices were mounted on the wrong holes.  Problem number one.  They also felt there as a major issue with the left front tire that no amount of balancing would fix and I needed to have the tire looked at and probably replaced due to either a manufacturing defect or a problem caused by hitting a road obstacle.

So when we got back to near where I bought the tires, I took the RV back in, fully expecting to end up having to pay for a new tire to really fix the problem, and maybe get an adjustment on the price but probably not.  Not the kind of thing I like to have to waste time on.

Well, they finally figured out that the original balancing weights had NOT been removed after all.  The whole problem was with two systems trying to balance the tires, neither one worked well.  They removed the weights and wanted me to road test the RV to make sure it was now OK.

My question to them was, “Did you remove the weights from the other wheel?”  There was a kind of “deer in the headlights” moment for the service manager, who said, “I’ll check”.  Sure enough, no one had bothered to check the other wheel for the unwanted weights so they removed them as well.

The good news is, several months later, I finally have extremely smooth riding tires.  The Centramatics devices certainly smooth out the tires, much better than the original static weights that were never really great.  These are maybe the smoothest tires at any speed of anything I have ever driven. 

[Of course, when Centramatics pulled the tires to look at the install of their devices, they could have looked for the weights, too, but that’s a different verse of the same song.]

January 21, 2017