the 38.5" tires i pulled out of a scrapyard for $200 needed a bit of work, as you could imagine.
firstly, one was pissin air all over the place and was flat in 2 days. so ipopped the bead, cleaned out all the dirt in the bead, and threw some gasket tack sealer in there and reset it. hasen't lost a pound in a week, so that problem was solved.

the main issue i was having was, over a certain speed (around 30-45 mph), the truck would literally BOUNCE. the tires were not out-of-round, so i deduced they were quite unbalanced. problem is, no one can balance tires this big. i found one place that said they could manage it, but they wanted $100 [:'(]F that.

i made a trip to harbor freight, purchased an incredibly small and cheap bubble tire balancer, for $5. yep, $5. now i just needed weights.

of course, no one sells weights. sooo i went to strauss discount auto, and was able to convince the manager to sell me a box of stick-on wheel weights they use for customers. not a bad deal...i got 11 and a half pounds of weights for $10, cuz the guy didnt know what to charge me.

anyway, let me summarize: balancer worked GREAT, and my tires are thousands time better. they are not perfect, but i sure as hell ain't complaining. i get very, very mild shimmy at a certain speed, but its thousands times better than how it was.

here's a couple pics- one of the balancer sitting on a little wodden stand, one of the MASSIVE amounts of weights needed to balance these suckers (about 40 ounces), and one showing how many weights are on one wheel, front and back, and was still unbalanced!

[IMG]local://upfiles/28056/671FB79DA1E242B6B476002429296E45.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]local://upfiles/28056/C0FBE688A8164556B13D7ED73F690F68.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]local://upfiles/28056/6F576CA8D4044591AB7D60D24B508EAD.jpg[/IMG]

 

holy weights []lol, how in the name of hell does that balance tires? can you explain that, thats interesting, never seen anything like that before

 

its a bubble balancer... its' very simple once you see it in action.

all you do is place the hub ofthe wheel over the top cone piece of the balancer. the cone is balancing on a piece of threaded rod, soo the heavy side of the tire goes down, and you just add weight to the other side to even it out.

a bubble balancer only balances statically, not dynamically. that is why i still have shimmy. but, the wheel tramp (up and down movement) is gone, which is what i was going for.


also, that is a lot of weight, but notall that bad considering the size of the tires. there was someone else on pavementsucks that had unbalancer 41" iroks, and he said it took about 3 pounds a piece to balance.

 

i work at a tire shop i would of balanced them for ya and can i say hole crap that is the most sticky weights i have ever seen on one rim in 2 years of work at a tire shop

 

I grew up on a ranch, and we used a bubble balancer like that for every tire on the ranch, including our daily driver cars and trucks. It worked great. We never had any tire problems due to balance issues. Now that I think about it, I wonder where my dad got the box of weights we used? I can't think of anyone that sells them either. The harder part was breaking tires down. That was a b!tch doing it by hand, escpecially on some of the older tractor tires. The ones that had calcium chloride liquid in the tires were a serious pain to work on too.