Ex that was a kick ass reply! With your Tacoma how well did the beads hold up with keeping the wheels balanced?
The 2007 Tacoma was my first time phookin' around with airsoft balancing, and I went back to traditional balancing when I sold it.
I put 10 oz. of .20 gram airsoft pellets/beads/BBs in each of the 255/85R16 (~33.5x10.5-16) BFG MT KM tires on the Taco.
- 20% of the time, it was PERFECT!
- 20% of the time, it was HORRIBLE!
- 60% of the time, it was OK
A little insight into how the BBs act:
The BBs fall down inside the tire until about 25-30 MPH, where they transition to staying spread out against the inside of the tread.
The BBs stay flung out against the inside of the tread until you come to a stop (or close to it).
If I hit the transition speed in the Taco while going through a corner (like a curved freeway on-ramp), I would have a horribly unbalanced tire.
Occasionally, the beads would not redistribute properly after hitting an odd bump on the freeway and I would have a horribly unbalanced tire.
Either of the two scenarios above would require me to pull over and stop to regain good balance, unless I lucked out and hit a bump right to clear it up.
On the Jeep, I put 8 oz. of .20 gram BBs and 6 oz. of propylene glycol inside when I mounted the tires on the beadlocks.
Later, while resolving death wobble and shimmy issues, I added 8 oz. of distilled water through the valve stems.
This brought me up to 22 oz. of dynamic balancing media in each tire, and the last 8 oz. did not make a huge difference.
- 20% of the time, it is GOOD to perfect
- 20% of the time, it is BAD (but not horrible)
- 60% of the time, it is OK to good
The addition of propylene glycol got rid of the Taco's problem of the beads requiring a ridiculous level of intervention on my part to get unfooked sometimes.
I do not worry about the transition point with my current setup, so the glycol is an effective lubricant (and anti-freeze).
However, the BBs have a worse axial imbalance on average in the 12.5" tires on 10" rims on my JK than they did in the 10.5" on 8" rims on the Taco.
In summary:
- Adding lube to the BBs totally helps them correct for any RADIAL imbalance more quickly and accurately.
- Narrower rims and tires are the only way to minimize AXIAL imbalance - the BBs cannot compensate for that.
- A tall, narrow tire on a narrow rim would probably balance almost perfectly using BBs, glycol, and water.
- Dynamic media balancing is great a lot of the time, but not all of the time, and sometimes it just sucks.
This coming week, I plan to pull the tires, vacuum and clean out all of the balancing media, and check the rims for axial and radial runout.
I believe that Trail Ready did a good job but I never checked the rims for machining accuracy, so it's time to verify that TR earned the faith I have in them.
If and when the rims pass my inspection, I will reassemble the tires and static balance them using a bubble balancer and tape weights.
I know that my MTR/Ks have some radial runout, and I changed rims when the tires had 15k on them, so they bring a bit to the shimmy party.
However, I had no major problems before I moved the tires over to my beadlock rims.
I had an immediate onset of death wobble on the shakedown run of my new rim/tire combination.
The death wobble itself was the result of a blown out flex joint in my front lower control arm, but the onset was from the new chassis dynamics.
Specifically, I now had my tires on wider rims with less backspacing. This provided the leverage to bring the shimmy to instigate the wobble.
Shit, it's late - time to bail on this.
I'll get into the rest of that crap later.