I know this might sound kinda nuts on first pass (and I had my doubts about this initially being a good idea) but here's the basic pitch – and these considerations might help you to decide whether or not this is something you'd be interested in . . . . or not:
1) if you have two cars (or more!), and you get the wheels balanced an average once a year, you are spending probably multiple hours sitting in the waiting area of exciting places like Tire Kingdom, NTB Tire, Discount Tire, Costco, etc., wondering if the staff is doing a good job or not. Not infrequently, in my experience anyway, the balancing has to be redone, at least once in a while, adding to the frustration and massive time-wasting. Additionally, dynamic wheel balancing is not cheap typically around $20 a wheel (more for so called ‘lifetime balancing’ which few outfits still offer). Between the lost time (sitting in these exciting places with other bored and/or anxious customers) and the cost, a dynamic wheel balancer can pay for itself in just a few years, particularly if you value your time, as most of us do. If you ‘go in’ with let's say just 4-5 other people in your area, it would cost only $200-250/family group for many years of wheel balancing. After costing out my time sitting and waiting in these big commercial shops, I realized that I would save the purchase cost of this in just 3 years, even without splitting the investment with any other owners.
2) The other advantage is that with proper calibration of one of these machines, if you have even modest technical skills, you are more likely to get a 'spot-on' balance than going to one of those big commercial tire places – at least in my personal experience with having done 45+ years of paying for somebody else to balance the wheels on my car. And those big commercial places often use a version of this machine, or a more expensive version that is operationally very similar. My wife is no version of any kind of car nut (unlike her husband) – and yet she can tell the difference immediately in terms of how smooth the car is on the highway after my rebalancing all 4 wheels – and in her case this was after paying for two trials of balancing at big auto care centers. Vibration, noise and harshness are primary variables in promotion of driving fatigue on long distance trips, so you get real benefit, esp. on trips. I'm sure all the do-it-yourselfers would endorse that doing the job yourself means you know that it was done properly – and spot on balance (and detecting significant runout) is particularly critical if you're tracking your Tesla, where you're regularly exceeding 100 miles an hour. So the dividends are multiple (long term cost, grief and time wasting reductions, quality of results), even if you're not tracking your car, but especially if you are.
3) it's actually very easy to run one of these machines, and the machines are vectoring towards $1000 with steady-to-declining prices, despite problems with supply chains. I was surprised how easy it was (despite some obfuscation and poor English in the documents) to calibrate the machine and get the balance spot on. Within only a half an hour or so, I was confident that I was getting good results.
3) An additional advantage is that once the wheel and tire are mounted, you can see very quickly whether or not you need wheel straightening from your last encounter of a pothole (or curb) kind! Additionally, relatively minor rim bends can benefit from re-balancing (with reduction in vibration), while some (typically anything > 3-4mm) mean you have to bit the bullet, dismount the tire, and pay to have the wheel straightened and the tire remounted. But once again, you still save (money and grief) at the other end on balancing.
4) if you have multiple contacts in the local area who are also 'car nuts'/gearheads and who are willing to split the cost, the potential payback period becomes even shorter. With eight ‘subscriptions’ (@$150/a piece for say 5 years of unlimited balancing) the payback period is immediate – you recover your investment right away and you and folks subscribing to using your machine reduce cost and grief from there.
5) the machines are fairly compact and don't take up that much space particularly if you have an extra bay in your garage. But even if you don't.
6) a quick introduction including tips on calibrating the machines, basic review of the common layout for the operating systems of these dynamic balancing machines will quickly make it clear that these are not difficult pieces of hardware to operate. Indeed far and away the hardest issue (where the only real safety and liability issues sit) is jacking the car up and getting the wheel off and back on safely.
Another option would be to have a small group demonstration for folks in my area (SW FL) – I could accommodate at most 12-15 people to do the teaching and demonstrating – I’m in Punta Gorda. If there is enough interest I'd be happy to provide pizza and other refreshments. Bigger crowds might be hard to accommodate in my garage (which not surprisingly is full of car gear, extra wheels and tires, etc.), and makes hands-on teaching more difficult. Parking is also a potential limitation. But in any case please leave comments if in Southwest Florida and you're interested in a group demonstration.
Ratings:
Overall I give this machine, which I purchased on Amazon, 4.5/5 stars. It's a homerun on the value equation, and the overall accuracy of wheeling balancing is also very high and I believe this mitigates significantly some minor issues but as always . . . caveat emptor.
Value: 5/5 – for the money and considering what you get, it's really a great value overall.
Merchant Seller: 4/5 – some concerns from feedback on Amazon raising at least raise the possibility of questionable sales practices but these are 3rd party reports of course. Also, they were responsive to my questions and they sent me a PDF of the manual which I was then able to print out – as the included printout is frankly of poor quality.
Documentation: 4/5 – clearly not written by a native English speaker (what else is new these days) and I have to believe that the requirement of a steel wheel to do calibration is unnecessary – in a update to this review, I will test recalibration with a larger alloy wheel and post results.
Accuracy of Wheel Balance: 5/5. Capable balancing within a few grams.
Ease of Calibration: 3.5/5 – cumbersome and counterintuitive that you are required to work with a steel wheel with a mounted tire. I was able to calibrate more than adequately just with the steel wheel without a tire being mounted. Not entirely clear that the calibration routine has been well thought out or that even that the description of it in the documentation is entirely functionally accurate.
Quality of accessories : 3/5 – does not include calibration wheel
Durability: open question, given the Florida humidity and the warnings about no higher than 80% humidity. No real data.
1) if you have two cars (or more!), and you get the wheels balanced an average once a year, you are spending probably multiple hours sitting in the waiting area of exciting places like Tire Kingdom, NTB Tire, Discount Tire, Costco, etc., wondering if the staff is doing a good job or not. Not infrequently, in my experience anyway, the balancing has to be redone, at least once in a while, adding to the frustration and massive time-wasting. Additionally, dynamic wheel balancing is not cheap typically around $20 a wheel (more for so called ‘lifetime balancing’ which few outfits still offer). Between the lost time (sitting in these exciting places with other bored and/or anxious customers) and the cost, a dynamic wheel balancer can pay for itself in just a few years, particularly if you value your time, as most of us do. If you ‘go in’ with let's say just 4-5 other people in your area, it would cost only $200-250/family group for many years of wheel balancing. After costing out my time sitting and waiting in these big commercial shops, I realized that I would save the purchase cost of this in just 3 years, even without splitting the investment with any other owners.
2) The other advantage is that with proper calibration of one of these machines, if you have even modest technical skills, you are more likely to get a 'spot-on' balance than going to one of those big commercial tire places – at least in my personal experience with having done 45+ years of paying for somebody else to balance the wheels on my car. And those big commercial places often use a version of this machine, or a more expensive version that is operationally very similar. My wife is no version of any kind of car nut (unlike her husband) – and yet she can tell the difference immediately in terms of how smooth the car is on the highway after my rebalancing all 4 wheels – and in her case this was after paying for two trials of balancing at big auto care centers. Vibration, noise and harshness are primary variables in promotion of driving fatigue on long distance trips, so you get real benefit, esp. on trips. I'm sure all the do-it-yourselfers would endorse that doing the job yourself means you know that it was done properly – and spot on balance (and detecting significant runout) is particularly critical if you're tracking your Tesla, where you're regularly exceeding 100 miles an hour. So the dividends are multiple (long term cost, grief and time wasting reductions, quality of results), even if you're not tracking your car, but especially if you are.
3) it's actually very easy to run one of these machines, and the machines are vectoring towards $1000 with steady-to-declining prices, despite problems with supply chains. I was surprised how easy it was (despite some obfuscation and poor English in the documents) to calibrate the machine and get the balance spot on. Within only a half an hour or so, I was confident that I was getting good results.
3) An additional advantage is that once the wheel and tire are mounted, you can see very quickly whether or not you need wheel straightening from your last encounter of a pothole (or curb) kind! Additionally, relatively minor rim bends can benefit from re-balancing (with reduction in vibration), while some (typically anything > 3-4mm) mean you have to bit the bullet, dismount the tire, and pay to have the wheel straightened and the tire remounted. But once again, you still save (money and grief) at the other end on balancing.
4) if you have multiple contacts in the local area who are also 'car nuts'/gearheads and who are willing to split the cost, the potential payback period becomes even shorter. With eight ‘subscriptions’ (@$150/a piece for say 5 years of unlimited balancing) the payback period is immediate – you recover your investment right away and you and folks subscribing to using your machine reduce cost and grief from there.
5) the machines are fairly compact and don't take up that much space particularly if you have an extra bay in your garage. But even if you don't.
6) a quick introduction including tips on calibrating the machines, basic review of the common layout for the operating systems of these dynamic balancing machines will quickly make it clear that these are not difficult pieces of hardware to operate. Indeed far and away the hardest issue (where the only real safety and liability issues sit) is jacking the car up and getting the wheel off and back on safely.
Another option would be to have a small group demonstration for folks in my area (SW FL) – I could accommodate at most 12-15 people to do the teaching and demonstrating – I’m in Punta Gorda. If there is enough interest I'd be happy to provide pizza and other refreshments. Bigger crowds might be hard to accommodate in my garage (which not surprisingly is full of car gear, extra wheels and tires, etc.), and makes hands-on teaching more difficult. Parking is also a potential limitation. But in any case please leave comments if in Southwest Florida and you're interested in a group demonstration.
Ratings:
Overall I give this machine, which I purchased on Amazon, 4.5/5 stars. It's a homerun on the value equation, and the overall accuracy of wheeling balancing is also very high and I believe this mitigates significantly some minor issues but as always . . . caveat emptor.
Value: 5/5 – for the money and considering what you get, it's really a great value overall.
Merchant Seller: 4/5 – some concerns from feedback on Amazon raising at least raise the possibility of questionable sales practices but these are 3rd party reports of course. Also, they were responsive to my questions and they sent me a PDF of the manual which I was then able to print out – as the included printout is frankly of poor quality.
Documentation: 4/5 – clearly not written by a native English speaker (what else is new these days) and I have to believe that the requirement of a steel wheel to do calibration is unnecessary – in a update to this review, I will test recalibration with a larger alloy wheel and post results.
Accuracy of Wheel Balance: 5/5. Capable balancing within a few grams.
Ease of Calibration: 3.5/5 – cumbersome and counterintuitive that you are required to work with a steel wheel with a mounted tire. I was able to calibrate more than adequately just with the steel wheel without a tire being mounted. Not entirely clear that the calibration routine has been well thought out or that even that the description of it in the documentation is entirely functionally accurate.
Quality of accessories : 3/5 – does not include calibration wheel
Durability: open question, given the Florida humidity and the warnings about no higher than 80% humidity. No real data.
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