A wheel and tyre assembly is never perfectly even. There is a heavier side, by a few grams, and at low speed you would never know about it. Spin it faster and that small imbalance becomes a force that climbs steeply with speed, so a wheel that felt faultless at twenty miles an hour is shaking the steering by fifty. Balancing is simply the business of finding where the heavy part sits and fixing a small weight on the opposite side of the rim to cancel it out.
The reason this becomes a night time subject is that most people never drive fast enough in daylight to feel it. Traffic holds you below the speed at which an imbalance shows itself, so the wheel sits there for weeks behaving impeccably. Then you go out at two in the morning, the road actually runs for once, and the steering starts shuddering through your hands at one particular speed and settles again above it. Nothing broke overnight. You simply reached the part of the speed range where the fault lives, for the first time since the tyre was fitted.
Ten past six on a Sunday morning is a strange time to need a tyre and a very ordinary time for us. That holds on Tower Bridge Road as much as on a residential street. Old tyres leave Surrey Quays, Grange and SE1 with us, every time. You watch it happen in Grange, or at the kerb in Tower Bridge Road. SE1 takes in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, and we work the lot.
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Bermondsey at three in the morning is a different place. Jamaica Road runs freely, Tower Bridge Road is clear right up to the bridge, and the speeds you can genuinely reach are exactly the ones that expose a wheel nobody balanced properly. That is why we are called out about vibration far more at night than during the day, when the same car spends its life crawling and feels perfectly smooth doing it. If a shake has appeared on a quiet road, it has probably been waiting there a while for the traffic to clear.
A driver felt nothing wrong for a fortnight, then met a steering shake on an empty stretch of Jamaica Road after midnight. The wheel had gone on without being balanced, and daytime traffic had hidden it completely.
A stick on weight had been scraped clean off the inside of a rim while parking near Southwark Park Road. The wheel was correct when it left the fitter; it stopped being correct the moment that weight came away.
Every wheel we fit is balanced before it goes back on, at the kerb, at whatever hour we were called out. It is not a step that gets left over for the morning.
Because an imbalance produces a force that rises sharply with speed, and the car has a range where the steering responds to it most. Below that you feel nothing, and above it the frequency often passes out of the range you notice. That is how a fault hides for weeks in slow traffic.
It usually points to a rear wheel rather than a front one. A front imbalance comes up the steering column into your hands, while a rear one arrives through the floor and the seat. Both are the same fault in a different corner and both are put right the same way.
Yes. The balancer travels on the van with everything else, and a wheel does not care whether it is being spun in a workshop or beside a kerb in SE16. We run 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and balancing is part of the job rather than an extra.
It could. A buckled rim, a tyre that has lost its shape or corrosion where the wheel meets the hub all produce something similar. Balancing sorts out which it is fairly quickly, because a wheel that will not balance to a sensible figure is a wheel with a different problem.
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