Balancing R/c Wheels.

[JERRY2KONE]

Ok well we have been talking about how to balance our R/C wheels for a while now, because it will deffinitely improve your vehicles handling, and I wanted to share what I have come up with. I started a thread last month on using beadlock wheels instead of gluing regular wheels all the time. What a pain that is. Anyway I have a couple sets of Axial beadlocks now with 40 series tires, and they are great.

Anyway from that thread it lead into taping tires, and balancing wheels for better vehicle performance. So I wanted to take it all the way and do whatever I could to make things work better. So I glued the insert to the rim with a bead of CA glue in either side of the rim in order to keep the insert from shifting during operation, which would throw the wheel balance out of wack. Then I turned the tire inside out and wrapped reinforced packing tape on the center of the wheel two times to help prevent balooning as much as possible. After remounting the tire and clamping them in place on the Axial wheel it was time to do some balancing. Once I figured it out this is really easy to do.

So I had purchased one of those Dubro wheel balancers from T/H, but it is just too small for MT tires. So I mounted the unit halves to my truck stand and spaced the two halves far enough apart to accomodate MT wheels. I also tried their nifty adapter shaft kit, but that is just way to pewny to be of any use with MT wheels. So I had to make up a custom shaft setup for the Axial wheels 17mm adapter. I found something in my shed hardware stuff for the rod ends that works perfectly. It is actually two binder caps for holding paper in a binder.

Then the fun begins. You rotate the wheel slowly and let it settle to a stand still. Usually it will kind of lunge and go back and forth until the heaviest side ends up on the bottom. Then you place some kind of counterweight (on the inside) of the opposite side (top)of the rim. You just repeat this step until the wheel spins freely without lunging or going back and forth. You will see that it actually spins smoothly much longer once you get the balancing correct. Without using a computer it is not a perfect science, but you can get things pretty well setup for inproved performance. It will actually take some strain off of your drivetrain and chassis by doing this. So there you have it. I am attaching some photos from photopbucket of my balancer setup.

I PLACED THE PHOTO LINKS IN A POST BELOW