Fuch Wheel balancing

See if you can find a "Road force" balancing machine.  Some car dealers have them, and once in a while you find that tire stores have them - If they don't have one at the store, they usually know who does.  They look similar to a regular balancing machine, but have a roller incorporated to simulate the wheel riding on the road and can balance any wheel to a gnat's pituty for accuracy.

While these are certainly not essential to balancing a Fuchs (actually, any balancer with an experienced technician running it will balance your wheels) Just the fact that they have a slightly more advanced unit usually means that the technician is a bit better than ordinary.

http://www.hunter.com/wheel-ba...ers/road-force-touch

Stick-on weights shouldn't be a problem for a competent shop - if they say you don't need them then your answer is "I don't need YOU!"

Unfortunately, correctly balancing wheels means that both inside and outside weights may have to be used !

 ReV

I have std wide fives on my Speedster and Spyder one of the issues I've found is no one seems to have an adapter to spin balance these older open rims. I've found one tire outfit in the area where I live who has one and this is shaky at best (they had to dig it up then didn't seem to have the right bolts to hold the rim on).

I've asked before about adapters for balancing and there was one available years ago but I have been unable to find one. 

Do you  guys know if this "Road force" balancing machine needs the same adapter? In the picture it looks like it does and then it's back to the same issue for me. 

Thanks in advance for suggestions

Pete

Rims were made in both lug centric and hub centric.  For example, early Porsche 914 '70-73? were lug centric - where the lug bolts and not the center hub was meant to be used to balance the wheel assembly.  An adapter was needed on the balancing machine.  In '74? they went to hub centric where a recessed ring was machined into the alloy wheels and a matching ridge was in the brake rotor.  For lug centric wheels (to include the wide-fives), the wheels are best balanced on the vehicle.  

There are even hub centric wheel spacers to keep proper wheel geometry.

"For lug centric wheels (to include the wide-fives), the wheels are best balanced on the vehicle.  "

IIRC! That was a "Bear" on-car balancing machine which, believe me, nobody has anymore.  I've been looking for one for years on ebay/craigslist with no luck.

Pete:  all of the current crop of balance machines will need an adapter for wide fives, and the last place that had them, "Mainely Custom by Design" is no longer in business.  I think he sold them for about $65 bucks.  I'll ask my 356 club folks where his inventory went and if any adapters are still around and get back to you.

gn

BTW:  someone in the local club made a wide five adapter out of a wide five brake drum......

Gordon Nichols posted:

"For lug centric wheels (to include the wide-fives), the wheels are best balanced on the vehicle.  "

IIRC! That was a "Bear" on-car balancing machine which, believe me, nobody has anymore.  I've been looking for one for years on ebay/craigslist with no luck.

Pete:  all of the current crop of balance machines will need an adapter for wide fives, and the last place that had them, "Mainely Custom by Design" is no longer in business.  I think he sold them for about $65 bucks.  I'll ask my 356 club folks where his inventory went and if any adapters are still around and get back to you.

gn

BTW:  someone in the local club made a wide five adapter out of a wide five brake drum......

I found a place that still has the old Bear on-the-car spin-balancer in Peoria. The nice part is when you get this done, you are also balancing the hub, which is a large chunk-'o-metal.

An adapter ring isn't very hard to make.

Gee.....Quick bunch of responses from the local folks.

http://www.precisionmatters.bi...alancing-adapter.php

More money than I remember, but these things are collector quality and will last forever.

Or, you could get a brake drum machined.........$$$

But that Bear "on-the-car" balancer brought back memories of Eddie Doane balancing the double rear wheels (2 VW sedan rims, welded together at the rim lips) on my '57 pan-based Dune Buggy at his little, one-man garage.  Cigarette dangling from his mouth, pushing the power roller up against the front tire, slightly dingy hat just a bit ascue, trying to focus his gaze through a pair of dirty, scratched bi-focals to see the five or six little weighty-things sticking out of the clip-on wheel unit.  

When we got around to the rear wheels, he would twiddle those little weights as I got the car into 4'th and then held it at a vibrating speed as he made the vibrations go away, and then go up and down the rpm range looking for more vibration points and holding a shake long enough tfor him to make it go away with the machine twiddle weights.  

Once he was done, the machine would tell him how much weight to center where on each rim and that was it - the best balance job ever.  Cost?  $10 bucks per wheel, including the weights.  Then Eddie would always give me a free coke from his Coke machine, even though later I would learn that if you chose a Ginger Ale on the same machine you would get a Bud or Narragansett beer.

Wafting nostalgic, here.......

Thanks Wolf, Gordon and Stan, 

Very cool Gordon, thanks for the link. I'm going to order one. 

Pete

Get one of these, too......   (to much $$$ for me and too far away)

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1940s-...26877491&vxp=mtr

And you still need the power roller for the fronts, but you can at least do the rears.

If you want as few weights as possible on your wheels go to a place that Gordon mentioned (Road Force).  Having said that, the balancing will only be as good as the guy working the machine.

A good tech will spend the time to get it right, but you'll probably have to pay more.   To do it right the tech will have to rotate the tire to best match the wheel's weight bias.

One of the most difficult wheels/tires to balance is those on a Mazda Miata.  If the wheels are not balanced to the Nth degree there will be a shimmy, which usually occurs at around 60 mph.

"Then Eddie would always give me a free coke from his Coke machine, even though later I would learn that if you chose a Ginger Ale on the same machine you would get a Bud or Narragansett beer."

My tire guy is like that; there's always beer in the fridge. He's a "help yourself if you're thirsty" kind of guy, but I always seem to visit him at 10 or 10:30am, though, and I always have things to do for the rest of the day. It just feels so wrong to turn down free beer...

Franny Mahroney was the best body man I ever met, and one of the last of the "Lead Guys", still using lead on steel car panels well into the 1980's, when he died.  He taught me how to weld sheet metal with a torch (even though I can't electric-weld worth anything, to this day I can still do good, seamless welds in sheetmetal).  He used three torches at once to do a proper lead job; a wide-angle blowtorch to massage the area with heat, a smaller one to prep the specific area and a third one to apply the lead, often working with a torch in each hand and applying the lead to the panel via a long wooden dowel held in his teeth, with the lead attached at the far end with a tiny pair of vise grips.  It was amazing to watch, but the panel needed minimal secondary filing or sanding and never came loose.  Well, sometimes a big section would simply fall off because the base panel was contaminated, but he would start over again by really cleaning that panel and the work was fine after that.

Franny was also an alcoholic, and loved his beer.  He always had at least four cases chilled in his two fridges, usually Budweiser, and would go through a case a day or more, usually drinking 3-4 as lunch.  If I happened to get there a bit early (like 8am-ish), I always found him cleaning the shop while he put  2-3 beers to get his hands to stop shaking and then he got to work.  

In the 1970's he got into making "dune buggies", but his cars looked a bit like a cross between a model a roadster and a tiny clown car;

It was his first foray into fiberglass (he was a "Lead Guy", after all), and he made the body lay-ups really thick to make sure they were strong.  He only made 6 of them and they ended up in local hands and used as terrific back-country hunting vehicles before the advent of modern ATV's.  I really wish I still had one......

In the 20 or so years I knew him, I only saw him sober once or twice and it was not a pretty sight, but the lead and the beer and the fiberglass fumes weren't kind to Franny and he died, rather young, at 56 years old.  I never made it to his funeral - either didn't hear about it or was too busy working at the time, but I wish I had because he gave me two gifts - he put up with a kid willing to ride 6 miles on a Raleigh 3-speed bike just to be in his shop and, to keep that kid occupied he taught him how to weld with a torch.  Interestingly, he never offered me a beer (You ain't old enough, kid...), and I stopped dropping by when I was 17 or so, moving on to building my own dune buggies. 

Today and tomorrow are going to be gorgeous Autumn days and perfect for riding my bike.  I think I'll pedal on over to Cider Mill Lane, where Franny lived, just to think about "old times" - and the last of the "Lead Guys"...

You do good stories, Gordon.

Naaah.....I just repeat them well.  Maybe I'm just more observant than some.

We used to have a lot of "Characters" in my town when I was a kid;  "Rabbit" LaFlamme (because he was quick) and his younger (and much shorter) brother, "Puppet".  Rabbit had the biggest, baddest-assed Harley around in the days before electric start, and Puppet had a Metallic Purple (yes, purple) 6.5 liter '65 GTO that was even badder-assed and indisputably the fastest car around.  "Beansy" White who ran an autobody shop and drove a Model "A" year round (with a Bendix hot water heater).  Some ham-radio kid who went to Central America when he was 17 and built a Dune buggy out of wood when he returned.  A guy building killer Porsche racing engines in a small shop out in the woods of Upton.  

And the farmers.....I once saw Ed Whipple put a bag of feed grain on each shoulder and one under each arm and carry them all to his truck - Back then, grain came in 100 pound bags.  Think about that...   And he loaded an entire truck like that.  His son, Ed jr., wasn't a farmer but spent 20 years as a submariner in the Navy and was killed in a car crash five days after retiring from the Navy.  And Paul DesMaris, who kept a pair of oxen busy working on his farm, even though he had the usual pair of John Deere tractors.  He loved those oxen like his kids, spoke full sentences to them and they responded like they fully understood.  Watching them work when Paul was doing some logging was mesmerizing - They anticipated what he would be doing next and maneuvered to set themselves up without a word from Paul.

We don't seem to have as many "characters" around these days.  Maybe we've all become a little less flamboyant, maybe it's subconscious political correctness, I don't know.  There are still people doing extraordinary things, but more quietly, harder to notice.  Instead of "big people", I find myself watching children.  Those who have not yet learned to be "correct" and are more whimsical.  Still, it's fun to people watch to see where human nature is taking us.  Life truly is the trip.

Like I said...

@Gordon Nichols well I have been trying to get my original fuchs 16inch 7&6 inch rims balanced.  I had them done by a roadforce guys who supposedly do all kinds of high end exotic cars.  Well I have had nothing but issues.  Slow steering wheel shake at 30mph, weights that don't stick and finally they static balanced them on the roadforce and they are silk smooth until 60mph but then the Swheel shakes and stops shaking in and out of this mode until 80mph... the guy tells me he can't put any weights on the outside which is the problem... comments?... I think I need a new shop. 

I'd agree. Fuchs are usually dead-nuts true and balanced. So the problem is either the tires or possibly a worn front end part. But check to make sure they run true first just in case. Since they're forged they usually just break if they bend, but they are VERY strong and light.

Well it's 2 years and a bit over 8K miles the front end can;t be gone  

DannyP posted:

Since they're forged they usually just break if they bend, but they are VERY strong and light.

I've always thought that being forged, they would bend first before breaking. A cast aluminum wheel will break on impact. Have I got it wrong?

I don't know, Al. I've bent a few cast wheels and gently bent them back with blocks of wood and a BFH. I've never bent a Fuch. I've also never seen a bent one, so I guess I just assumed. I know they are strong as heck and light, and usually require minimal weight because of very little if any runout.

When I first got Pearl on the road (2000) I ran with a set of Continentals (can't remember the model, but they were supposed to be "performance" tires).  Those tires took LOTS of weights.  I think the weights are 1/4 oz. each and on one wheel alone I counted 32 of them!

So I ran with them for years with some of the same issues you have, Ray - never had the slow speed stuff, but it would shudder like hell around 60-65 and then smoothed out over 70 or so.  I just put up with it.

When they got to be ten years old or more, I finally swapped them out for a set of Michelins (don't know that model, either).  What a difference!  Same weights (only placed on the inside of the rim) and each wheel has, maybe, 4 weights to get balanced.  I still have a body shake around 65-68, but it is far less pronounced and I attribute it to the horse-shoe shaped front bulkhead support.  If they welded gussets to it at the top corners I believe the shudder on my CMC would go away.  Anyway, when I get to New England Interstate speed (72 - 75mph) everything smooths out like a Cad'Lac so I just stay up there.   If the rims have years on them, they should clean the inside of the rim with brake cleaner so the weights stick better.

On the slow speed shake (30mph):  THAT could be either front end alignment or a mal-formed tire (thick and thin spots in the tread or sidewall).  The 60-80 shudder sounds familiar and yes, his machine will tell him to put weights on the outside of the rim, but the better guys know how to compensate with a selection/placement of weights on the inside to achieve the same effect.

I would find another shop and if they have the same issues then I would go with a different tire manufacturer.  The only guys with road force balancers around here are dealerships and all they usually see are their own brand of cars/wheels so they get complacent.  I doubt that it is the wheels.  As Danny said, original Fuchs are beyond pretty good - I had them spin balance just my wheels (no tires) when I was trying to figure mine out and they were perfect with no weights up to 80.

Thanks Gordon I agree that harmonics can drive you crazy at-times.   

 I might suggest

Sprint Classic Tires - Size: 185/70HR1 - I've had remarkable results with a set purchased back in November.