How to Balance a Motorcycle Wheel and Tire

Hi, I'm Eric from Jakewilson.com and Rockymountainatvmc.com and today I'm going to show you how to balance a motorcycle tire using our Tusk balancing and truing stand. And we're going to start with assembly. The first thing we need to do is put the feet on. These help level the whole stand. Next we're going to put the bubble on so we can tell when we're level. They're little screws, use a little Phillips screwdriver to tighten them up and then we put the uprights on it. There are two adjustments; you can put it either narrower or wider. The wider one works for most applications. Put the supplied bolts and nuts and go ahead and tighten it and then you need to make sure its level by adjusting the feet. Next we're going to install the reference pointer. This is used a guide only when truing a wheel. Take note that it's not designed to actually touch the wheel; and all that's left is to orient the cones and the retaining collars on the bar. And then you're done. Now we have it assembled. It's time to go ahead and statically balance this wheel. To start with, we want to make sure that the cones rest on the bearing races. So we remove any spacers. It's going to go in like that and ride right on the bearing. We're going to put the bar through the wheel, put the cones on the other side and then we're going to snug up one side of it, lay it down, put all the weight of the wheel on the lower cone and we're going to tighten the retaining collar on the top. The goal here is to make sure that the wheel is nice and snug between the cones. Notice how the bar rides smoothly on the bearings. There's almost no friction. This is critical when statically balancing a wheel. All right. To start with, we've got the wheel up there and we're trying to find the heavy spot of the wheel. So we're rotating it slowly using our fingers to slow it down; slow down the pendulum effect. Once the tire finds its heavy spot, you can mark the other side of the tire, which would be its light spot. Here I'm putting a little piece of tape so we know where it's at and that is the light spot on the tire. It's the location that we're going to be attaching the stick on weights. We sell two different colors to match your bike. We're going to start off with three. And we're just using tape because we don't know exactly how many weights we need yet. So we're starting off with three. We rotate it 90 degrees and then we watch it. Looks like this one is still moving, so that means that three is too much weight. So I'm going to pull that off and put just two weights on it. Once we get that attached, were going to rotate the wheel once again about 90 degrees and watch it and two is close. It's just slightly moving but it's still moving. It looks like this tire and wheel combo isn't going to take much weight. Don't be alarmed if yours does. It's actually fairly common for wheels to take more weights. Two is too many so we're just going to try one. Put one on and then no matter where you put this weight, the wheel should stay static; it shouldn't move. You can try it in a couple of different locations just to make sure. But now we know that one weight is what we need to make sure this is balanced. Now we're going to clean off the surface where we're going to stick this weight on. Carefully peel the backing, stick it on the wheel. If your wheel requires more than one weight, you can distribute the weight between the left and the right hand side of the wheel. Then once we're done with that we can put it back on the stand and check our work. And as you can see, no matter where we put the weight or how we rotate the wheel, it just remains static, it's not moving and if these are the results you get, then you're ready to go.