Balance

Anyone run the balance beads inside tires to keep the ugly weights off the wheels......are they legit or just snake oil

 

balance beads are usually used on HUGE off road tires that are a problem to balance or unable to balance via the usual method. May not the best for a daily driver, street driven rig. It takes some speed for them to do their thing so at low speed the tires can still be off balance and have vibration. They became popular many many years ago when Fourwheeler magazine did some articles about them.

You would be much better served with a typical tire balance. If you are having issues with tire balance, find a shop that can do road force balancing.

Those beads are usually a last ditch effort to try and get balance for a street truck. If you have 37inch tires or less and can't get them to balance then there is something else going on- tire out of round, wheel bent or damaged, bad wheel bearing.

But you can run them for sure. Need to find a shop that knows about them to use the right product and amount for your application of course and like I said, you could still have some vibration at low speed or certain RPMs at speed.

 

No. They’re really only used on big off road tires that don’t see much road time. Plus you can’t use them unless you remove the tpms sensors as they will damage them.

 

I have 33s and i have beads. on 20" rims. Nitto tires.
They haven't damaged my TPMS sensors in any way.

and i completely agree my truck tires take a while to be smooth and sometimes aren't even after warming up.

They work, but i would prefer to have them balanced next time.

the previous poster pretty much summed them up.

I'd skip them if i trusted the shop to balance them correctly.

 

Thanks for the replies. They claim no damage to the tpms. I was more looking into the aesthetic side of things to keep the weights off the wheels......good info. I will have the weights installed to match 100% of the vehicles on the road

 

Quality wheels and tires won’t take much to balance. I have one wheel with only a single 1/4oz weight. No more than 4 on the other 3.