72 TA : New Project

[njsteve]

Spent last night at my buddy's garage dismounting all eight honeycomb rims from the four radials and four Polyglasses. We found the best, non-wobbliest rims and mounted the radials on them. Those honeycomb rims are extrememly hard to balance since a normal balancer that centers a rim with a steel cone, won't work with urethane face honeycombs. The problem is that the center portion of the urethane face of the honeycomb is molded around a steel cone-shaped, support that is not set in any particular spot on the rim. As a result, the center opening on a honeycomb is not concentrically aligned with the steel portion of the rim.

We used his balancer to check each rim for lateral curb damage but when you tried to set the mounted rim on the balancer to balance the wheel assembly for out-of-round, it was like watching a merry-go-round horse. Luckily he had a friend at a muffler shop who had a different wheel balancer that had a retaining hub with the five centering posts that mounted the wheel by the lug holes, instead of the center hole. We did a static and dynamic balance that used the regular hammer-on weights on the inside edge of the rim and then mini, stick-on weights on the internal area near the center of the rim, on the back side.

Here's a version of the balancer contraption for lug-centric wheels that don't have a concentric center hub.



Worked like a charm. The car cruises up to 80 mph with no jiggles, vibrations, or rumbles. It rides like a Mercedes now. Kinda scary compared to the teeth chattering Polyglasses.

BTW, those heavy, repro Polyglasses were pretty much unbalance-able on the other four rims, so we just mounted them on the rims for show use only. When a balancing machine says you have to add the equivilent of a Porterhouse steak (16 oz) to the outside of the wheel to get it to balance, that's a little too much for me.