Road crashes occur majorly due to vehicle factors, and thus, the vehicle drivers and owners must focus on their vehicles and vehicle parts. It will enable them to reach their destination safely.

Aspects that are often neglected by most vehicle owners are wheel alignment and wheel balancing. These aspects seem to be confusing for many, and hence, they pay very little attention to these. These aspects play a role in ensuring driving safety and increasing tyre durability.

The wheel spins without any vibration in them only because of wheel balancing. You can get this done by inspecting the wheels for any presence of heavy spots on the combination of tyres and wheel by locating a lead weight on the wheel’s opposite side from the place an error is present. This article will take you through the significance of wheel balancing and its need for safe driving.

Safe Driving and Wheel Balancing

You can have the wheel balanced while getting your tyre replaced. Do you know what wheel balancing is? The regular weight distribution around a moving wheel and tyre assembly is wheel balancing. It ensures that the unit comprising a tyre and a wheel rim is balanced. Light and heavy or low and high spots are traced in both units. Matching the minor areas of one to heavy areas of the other is the major part of getting the entire tyre and rim unit balanced.

Adding weights to the entire unit to compensate for the light areas is the second part. It enables proper rotation. For preventing them from getting heavy spots, the wheels are balanced using counterweights. The heavy spots resulting in vibration and the premature wearing of suspension components, steering, struts and shocks.

The wheels get wobbled to the sides or bounces on the road if you drive with an imbalanced wheel. This disturbance due to the imbalanced wheel increases with an increase in speed.

It is believed that responsive tyres of low profile and lightweight suspension system are the two trends that increase the significance of balancing the wheels as these factors are very sensitive to wheel imbalances.

Unbalanced Wheels Are Fatal

These are few dangers of driving with imbalanced wheels:

• Severe strains and stresses are put on the suspension components and wheel bearings by the unbalanced wheels.
• The imbalanced wheels or incorrectly balanced wheels result in vibration during driving. This vibration affects the vehicle handling capacity and offers uncomfortable driving.
• Early wearing of rotating parts, suspension components and steering by unbalanced wheels.
• In extreme cases, the parts may fail, or the steering components may get deteriorated too early.
• It can be expensive and dangerous to ignore the symptoms.
• Increased fuel consumption and additional energy happen by unbalanced wheels.

Signs You Need to Perform Wheel Balancing

Being able to detect when the wheels are imbalanced, and there is a need of balancing the wheel is essential:

The symptoms of an imbalanced wheel are:

• An enjoyable and smoother driving is ensured when you have done the Wheel Balancing Cheltenham in your car. You can also save money and time spent due to tyre wearing.
• The cupped or scalloped wearing pattern on the tyres
• Floorboard or seat Vibration at high speeds
• Steering wheel vibration at high speeds
• When wobbling of the steering wheel occurs at a certain speed, this indicates unbalanced wheels. Modern cars are light in weight, but this doesn’t indicate that the vibrations caused by spinning wheels are not dampened by them in the way that heavier and older vehicles could.

Advice for Balancing Your Wheels

• You must balance all the wheels rather than just the front wheels if you trace the steering out of balance. You can always feel the rear unbalanced wheels through your car’s steering.
• While balancing the wheels, you must always perform both Static and Dynamic Balancing at the same time.