A wheel that goes back on without being balanced tells you about it somewhere around fifty. The steering starts to hum, then shimmy, then settle again as you speed up or slow down, and it is not subtle. All it takes is a few grams sitting on one side of a wheel turning at that rate.
Which is why the balancer travels with us rather than living in a workshop. The wheel comes off the car, the tyre goes back on the rim, the assembly gets spun and the weights go exactly where the machine says they go. That happens at one in the morning on a residential street the same as it happens at midday, and it is the difference between one visit and two.
There is a detail to it at night that nobody mentions. Stick on weights bond to the inside of the rim, and they will not bond to a cold, wet, dirty surface. So the face gets cleaned and dried first. Skip that and the weights are lying on the road within a fortnight, and you are back to a shimmy nobody can account for.
Bank holiday Monday, the school run, half past eleven at night: tyre trouble has no sense of timing, and neither have the places that are shut when it happens. The phone is answered round the clock and a van is dispatched round the clock, to St Helier, Morden town centre and everywhere between, every day of the year including the ones nobody wants to work. The St Helier phone and the Ravensbury phone ring the same fitter, any hour. Midnight in St Helier, midday in Ravensbury, the same call either way.
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Nights across SM4 are the easy shift. Streets in Lower Morden, or around Morden Park, that cannot be worked in at five in the afternoon have room at one in the morning, which matters when a wheel has to come off the car and a machine has to run beside it. The job finishes in one stop rather than being left half done.
A tyre changed at the kerb, spun on the balancer at the back of the van and weighted before it went anywhere near the hub. The driver started work at six, and nobody wanted a morning appointment to finish an open job.
Rain all evening and an alloy running with water down the inner face. Ten minutes drying and cleaning it back, then the weights went on and stayed on. Sticking them to a wet rim would have looked identical and lasted a week.
A car pulling badly at speed after a repair somewhere else. Spun up on the machine, that wheel balanced perfectly. The trouble was a buckle in the rim, which no amount of weight cures, and saying so cost us the sale.
Yes. The balancer runs off the van's own supply, the wheel mounts on its cone the same way it would indoors, and the machine reads what it reads wherever it happens to be standing. The roadside changes the lighting, not the accuracy.
It does. A patch is mass added at one point inside a tyre, and that wheel was balanced without it. Anybody who patches a tyre and hands it straight back has left you a job to discover later, at the worst possible speed.
If the rim was properly cleaned and dried when they went on, yes. If it was not, they come away in the first cold salty week and the shimmy returns. That preparation is most of the work, which is why it is worth watching.
Possibly not. Balance shows itself in a narrow band of speed and fades away above and below it. A shake that keeps getting worse the faster you go points at a buckled wheel or something else. We spin it and tell you which.
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