"stryped" wrote in message
...

I am a tool freak lol. Also, I live in the country with the nearest
town about 12 miles away and that one is a small one with only 1-2
shops other than wal mart that can change tires or repair flats.

Is it economically feasable to mount and balance car tires at home? Is
a used balancer on craigslist easy to come by? Is a professional tire
mounter necessary or would one of those TSC manual tire changers
suffice? I also have seen those bubble balancers but have heard they
dont work well for balancing automotive tires. Is this true? My wife
is needing some tires on her escape and it got me thinking. You can
actually order tires online but not sure if it is a huge cost savings
compared to wal mart or not. Part of the reasoning is my time.
Everything around here closes at noon on Saturday and Saturday seems
to be my only day available anymore.

Are you looking for a dynamic spin balancer? Most I have seen are pretty
pricey.

If you order tires online I would recommend getting pricing from multiple
places for mounting and balancing. At work (a tire manufacturing plant) we
get an employee discount but we have to buy our tires online through
tirerack.com. The plant checked several local places for tire installation,
the lowest price they found was $10 per tire for mounting and balancing,
this was from a car dealer. I was surprised that a car dealer was lower
than Wal-Mart but I think Wal-Marts service may include lifetime rotation
and balance.

Around 35 or so years ago my brother worked at a filling station, they did
tire changing and balancing, I went there and helped some. All they had at
first was a tire changer similar to TSC's manual changer, it worked fine but
the soap seemed to be the key ingredient. Soap up the bead and it worked,
try without the soap and it was very difficult if not impossible.

We have automatic machines at work that check tire balance, they have a
spindle with load cells and an encoder. For calibrating it spins the
spindle without a tire and records the load cell readings at encoder spindle
positions. Then we place a calibration weight on one side of the stepped
chuck (wheel) and it "learns" the difference. Then the weight is placed on
the other side and it "learns" that difference. In operation it uses the
calibration data and magic math to determine the tires out of balance amount
and angle.

If you're looking for a project you could come up with an encoded spindle
that runs in bearings mounted to load cells. Then a couple of load cell
amps, and encoder interfaced to a controller to take readings of each load
cell at various angles, figure out the math and indicate a balance weight
and position for the light side. Our older style auto-balancer uses an
airplane tire to contact the spindle and spin it up to speed, then the
airplane tire retracts so the spindle if free wheeling, keeps motors, belts,
pulleys, from messing with the balance reading. The newer style balancers
seem to have a direct drive servo motor.

RogerN