Mike Melton shows how a Road Force balancer detects vibration problems before tires go on a car. The machine applies 1,200 pounds of pressure to find issues like radial runout, where a tire is egg-shaped and causes shaking. Force-matching reshapes the tire back to round.
What Road Force Balancer is, it's a diagnostic machine to check for any kind of vibrations before we put tires in your car. Not only that, we use a flange plate. What this does, not only protects the face of the wheel, because you don't want anything pressing on the face of that, it also gives you a better balance because it's balanced like it's actually on the vehicle itself. Now let me show you exactly how the machine works. So there's a roller here, and what it does, it puts 1,200 pounds of force on the tire, simulating it being driven on the vehicle. Like I said, it's going to put about 1,200 pounds of force on that tire. It's going to diagnose any kind of vibration issues before they go on that vehicle, because there's nothing more frustrating than getting a set of tires, brand new tires on your vehicle, and then you're going to have a vibration issue. So now, like this one here, it's a little too high for us. So what we're going to do, we're going to force match the tire and we're going to bring that radial runout down. So what radial runout is, it's kind of like your tire's in an egg shape. So if it's in an egg shape, what's it going to do? It's going to cause a vibration. So once we fix that runout issue, it's going to put— make it more of a circle.
