A Wheel Balancer Can Help You Smooth Out Your Ride

Giving your vehicle workshop clients the best service possible means ensuring that when every car leaves the shop it is like new. When you do a good job, customers will return again and again, so the better each car drives, the more satisfied your customers will be. One area where every workshop can make a significant improvement to the way a car drives is in the way the wheels are set up, and the best way to do this is using a wheel balancer.

A wheel balancer allows you to quickly and conveniently assess any slight imperfections in the way a wheel turns, and then add small weights to the wheel in order to offset the effect of these problems.

Getting the balance of wheels right on a vehicle will make a huge difference for the driver. When the wheels are running completely in true the ride quality will be a lot smoother, and the fuel efficiency will also be much improved.

The long term benefits of balancing wheels properly on a vehicle are that it reduces the mechanical vibration that the car feels and the vehicle will be much smoother on the road. In turn this reduces the amount of wear and tear suffered by key components of the vehicle – in particular the axle assembly and shocks, giving these parts a much longer lifespan.

One of the reasons why a wheel balancer is required in an auto work shop is that due to the manufacturing process used in making tires, there are always slight imperfections in them, such as slightly different thicknesses of rubber, and these cause the tire to be slightly uneven. This must be compensated for by adding small weights to the wheel in order to offset the effect of the tire’s imperfections.

The method by which a wheel is balanced is very straightforward. Quite simply, the process begins with the wheel being removed from the vehicle and mounted onto a wheel balancer. This is a computerized machine that rotates the wheel at a variety of different speeds. At the same time as this is done, the computer measures the vibration on the axle caused by the imbalances in the wheel. A calculation is then performed that advises the amount of weight that needs to be added to the wheel.

The variety of different wheel balancers available today is enough to ensure that every single workshop can have access to an appropriate model for the kinds of work that they most often carry out.

These days, even the most basic entry level wheel balancer will come armed with hi tech software that makes finding an imbalance and taking appropriate action as straightforward as any other mechanical task, and thanks to the easy to use and understand computer interfaces that have been built into these machines, diagnosing the problem with a wheel is straightforward.

A model like the Ammco Standard volume wheel balancer retails for less than $4000 at Red Hill Supply (special offer), and is ideal for smaller jobs. It runs a diagnostic on a 14 inch wheel in around 10 seconds and offers an accurate guide to where the weights need to be added for best effect. Moving up the line, the Ammco AMM950 high volume wheel balancer can carry out the diagnostic check in 5 seconds, making it ideal for a busy garage where time is important. The wheel balancer can take a comprehensive range of different wheel sizes, making it versatile and convenient.

At the very top end of the market, wheel balancers like the Ammco XR1800 are designed for environments where precision is essential. These top end models, which retail for less than $10,000 offer a comprehensive suite of diagnostic tools designed to make your job as easy as possible, and give you the highest possible standard of accuracy, making this product ideal for workshops dealing with high end vehicles.

With increasing demand for all areas of wheel balancing from customers who want to ensure better reliability, a more enjoyable ride, and better handling, now is definitely the time to invest in a tool that will make carrying out this precision task a lot faster and more convenient, giving you more time to concentrate on your key areas.

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