Wheel Balancing and Alignment

These 2-are as removed from each other as Adam from Eve - but yet compliment each other and are often ignored by an average motorist - especially the former.

Any mass produced wheel (Rim+Tyre/Tube) does not have ‘even’ weight distribution around its 3-axes. Consequently, when it rotates around its own axis, it tends to ‘Vibrate’ - the intensity of which is directly proportional to the degree of unbalance as above AND the rotational Rpm. As a car owner, it’s worthwhile to know that ‘vibration’, like cancer, is the biggest killer in any machine and thus needs to be nipped in the bud.

Such imbalance induced vibrations gain significance with the wheels Dia’s getting smaller for the mini’s and micro-mini’s and yet having higher cruise speeds’ capability. If left ‘un-treated’, they induce annoying steering wobble up front at various speeds - incl damage to the suspension members/bearings all around INCL at the rear. Wobbly wheels up front even affect free-rolling capabilities of a Car and thus eat into its fuel efficiency as well.

Consequently, ‘Dynamic’ Wheel Balancing techniques were developed way back in the ’50s in the West and like all others, are well computerised today. Take your wheels to any ‘tyre-shoppe’ and see them being balanced and you’ll know the rest.

To sum-up, it’s a fallacy that only one’s front wheels need to be balanced, say every 5 kkm under our driving conditions. The fact of life is that one should have all of one’s 5-wheels in good balance all the time, as one never knows when and where one of the 5-wheels may have to be used upfront too.

Wheel Alignment on the other hand is quite a different ball game. In the Amby/Fiat era - with miles of slack in the steering linkages anyway, one got away with the crude method of using a String with a ‘chhotoo’ to assist but not any more. For starters, present day Cars have their front ‘Track’ appreciably wider than the rear to give them the desired high speed cornering ability. To make it worse for the ’string-wallahs’, we now have Cars with independent rear suspension too calling for the rear wheels’ alignment as well!

All this has led to the development of the present ’state of art’ Wheel Alignment m/c’s using infra-red sensors to read/correct the basic parameters of a Car’s f/r suspension systems. Like for wheel balancing, take your wheels to any ‘tyre-shoppe’ and see them being ‘aligned’ and you’ll appreciate why it’s so important to have one’s wheel alignment checked/reset every 10 kkm in our context, if not SOS after hitting a bad pot hole or a rut.