I've been having trouble lately finding places to balance tyres properly. I live in the sticks and I guess that's to be expected. I mentioned to a fellow car buddy about this and asked who does a good job. Well he replied he has an old tyre balancing machine and he's looking to sell it. He said it's the kind that spins up the tyre on the vehicle.

Long story short, he brought it over and demonstrated it. The old crock really does work. With a little bit of practice I was able to get the two front tyres on the Impala SS running turbine smooth.

It's a bit beat up but since it works I bought it and can balance tyres at home now rather than pay someone and still have out-of-balance problems.

I'll say this about the machine: it will spin up a tyre to ludicrous speed. My friend mentioned it would spin a tyre to 100 MPH. I had a hunch it was faster than that as I thought it was going to take off.

I used my mechanical tack and held it to the dust cap whilst spinning up the tyre. It was 1800 RPM. Holy crap. With that information I went and looked up the circumference of a P255/50R17 tyre and with a little rudimentary algebra that works out to 144 MPH. My friend mentioned OSHA wouldn't allow these in shops anymore. Well I can see why.

No doubt you've heard the adage "Can't fix stupid".

Well this machine removes stupid from the gene pool as you can imagine all sorts of bad things happening if you don't pay attention with parts spinning that fast.

I was trying to find the age of machine and so set forth in trying to locate a manual for it. So far I could only find the first 3 pages.

Below is the picture of the cover. Yup, I know that car in the lower right hand picture intimately. Assuming the 1966 Ford Galaxie is either new or a couple years old, that puts this balancer in the late 60s. And the darn thing still works!

Just thought I'd share this one. Most people I have shown this to have said they've never seen anything like it before.

Note: Just thought I'd post a follow up on the usefulness of this machine. Since you do not have to use the electric universal motor to use the strobe and pickup, you can use this to balance other things besides tyres. I had the idea of why not use it to balance a propshaft on the car. Sure enough it worked great and found an imbalance there. I removed the rear tyres and put the lug nuts on to hold the rotors from flopping around and then placed the pickup under the pinion in the axle housing right next to the propshaft. I had my spouse up in the car and had her start the car and use the cars engine to spin up the propshaft. Sure enough the strobe light locked onto the imbalance (used existing weld on weight as reference). It took two hose clamps to counter weight it and balance it. The end at the transmission was fine. The car rode so much nicer at high speed after that.

We had the propshaft balanced by a so called propshaft specialty shop in ABQ in trying to find this elusive vibration the car never had before. They didn't do a good job either. I hate saying this, but I have to admit I am growing tired of places that just don't seem to care anymore about the quality of their work and still take your money. :mad: It's getting to the point where you have to do every little thing for yourself in order to get good results.

Cheers.

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