Balancing your Wire Wheels

Balancing Tires and Wire Wheels

When I bought my TR5 out of the estate of Charles Runyan, it came with Michelin redline tires on painted wire wheels. The tires looked great, and had very little wear on them, but at 20+ years old, I felt the prudent thing was to replace them before taking the car down the local interstate at 160 (remember, our TR5s have speedometers in kph, not mph !).

The factory stock TR5 wheel was a 4.5” steel rim, with a 'Rostyle' wheel trim (same as the 250).
An extra cost factory option for the 5 was 4.5” 60-spoke painted wire wheels. Although the TR5 did not come with redline tires, they became popular after people saw them on TR6s, and in my case, the redlines looked great on a signal red car with matching red brake calipers. But when I looked up redline tires, I found that there was only one manufacturer – Coker. They were pretty expensive, but being the only game in town I duly ordered a set of four (I reckoned I may as well hang on to my spare which had a Michelin). They arrived at the local Discount Tire store and I had them mounted on the wheels.

The first time I drove the car, I noticed a terrible wobble around 60 kph, so I brought them back to Discount Tire and asked if they would balance them again. They explained that, in order to balance them properly, they would have to add weights to the outside of the wheel. They had previously tried to balance them with weights “hidden” on the inside of the wheels. I told them it was not a problem and a few days later I got them back. I put them back on the car and took it for a drive. The wobble was better, but the steering wheel still shook in my hands.

At this point I did some research on the subject and found out:

1. Coker tires do not have a great reputation
2. Wire wheels can be a real pain to balance properly

I sent an email to our local Triumphs club, asking if anyone had any suggestions. I got several replies along the lines of “Tommy at Terrific Tire will sort you out”, but one guy made the point that the only guy in the country who really knows wire wheels is Allen Hendrix in Greenboro, North Carolina. I called Hendrix Wire Wheel and Allen answered. I explained my situation and he told me “Forget the Coker tires: go to Diamond Back Tires and they will make you a set of redlines. Have them drop ship them here and then send me your wheels.”

This seemed a lot of work, so I called Albert Runyan, Charles’s son and the guy now running The Roadster Factory. Albert has helped me out a lot with the TR5 and I asked him about the issue I was having. “I remember my father having a lot of trouble getting those Michelins balanced,” he said, “he ended up having to send everything to Allen Hendrix in North Carolina !!”

I looked up Diamond Back Classic Tires and discovered they were an online tire shop that creates custom tires for classic cars. Located in Conway, South Carolina, they were easy to deal with, and their price for four 185 x 15 tires was actually less than Coker. I took the Cokers back to Discount Tire and they said they could only issue a refund if the tires exceed a preset run-off limit on their machine. When they tested them, the Cokers were twice the limit, so I got a full refund.

I had the Diamondback tires drop-shipped at Allen Hendrix’s shop in North Carolina and I shipped my wheels there as well. Within a week they had cleaned and painted my wheels, and mounted and balanced the new Diamond Back tires. They arrived back at my house as promised and look fantastic. Interestingly, each wheel was marked as to where it should go on the car. I called and asked Allen about this. His reply was that tires come from the factory with no more than 40 thousandths of an inch runoff: he then works with the tires and wheels to minimize this number. If and when he has tires with zero runoff, they go on the front of the car, while the “worst” tire (no more than a few thousandths) goes on the right rear where its effect will be least noticed.

I then asked about rotating the wheels during the annual service and he told me there was no need to rotate wheels on our cars – that was an exercise which came in with modern cars with 4-wheel and all wheel drive. I never knew – and I’ll bet I am not the only one!

As an addendum to this story, I have spoken to a number of people about how to balance wire wheels without having to ship tires and wheels to North Carolina. The problem is that the modern machines do not hold our wheels in the center of the rotating mass, as explained in this technical article from Dayton Wire Wheels: 

http://www.daytonwirewheels.com/pdf/balancinginstructionsforspline.pdf

One way to get around this is, if the shop is open to the idea, to bring a wire wheel adaptor and adapt one of those hexagonal spinners as shown in the picture to allow the machine to balance the wheel which is now securely in place.