Bubble Balancer Fix

I have this balancer:
Portable Wheel Balancer
Whether it's any good or not is certainly debatable. However, the bubble level on mine dried out once. I drilled it open and refilled it with antifreeze. The last time I went to use it, the antifreeze was gone and the plastic that the level was distorted; rendering it worthless. I called Harbor Freight about a replacement level and was told no parts are available for it.
I started searching for a generic replacement and stumbled on a direct fit: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071FQK9H3/?tag=joeychgo-20
Just thought I'd post this in case anyone else runs into this.

Used to be all that was available to balance tyres years ago no fancy spin them up to so many mph and computer tell you where the weight goes

They work just fine like they have for about the last hundred years. There are much more advanced ways, but they work.

What, a what. lol
I sell tires for a wholesaler here in PA. I go from garage to garage. Im now in my late 50's and went to work for my dad in the garage when I was 15 in the 70's. Thats all we had until the mid 80's when dad bought a hunter spin balancer. As I go around todays shops I will ask some of the younger guys if they ever used a bubble balancer. Most of them dont even know what it is. And when you explain how we balanced tires in the old days using the triangle method that had weights on front and back they look at you like your nuts! I still have one. My dad actually still uses it instead of my Jim Beam balancer.
Great post!
Rod

rod7515 said:

What, a what. lol
I sell tires for a wholesaler here in PA. I go from garage to garage. Im now in my late 50's and went to work for my dad in the garage when I was 15 in the 70's. Thats all we had until the mid 80's when dad bought a hunter spin balancer. As I go around todays shops I will ask some of the younger guys if they ever used a bubble balancer. Most of them dont even know what it is. And when you explain how we balanced tires in the old days using the triangle method that had weights on front and back they look at you like your nuts! I still have one. My dad actually still uses it instead of my Jim Beam balancer.
Great post!
Rod

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Would you and maybe Rob and maybe a few other guys WHO REALLY KNOW how to "do" a bubble balance start a little tech article for those of use how "didn't?"

THANKS

First let me say that I have seen tires balanced in many different ways. I can only tell you what my dad told me was the correct way (his way) and I have always followed this. I can say I never researched for another method!

I'll try to get to my other garage and take some pics of the balancer as I balance a tire so this might make more sense. Im not good at explaining while typing!
When I first started working in the garage we werent able to balance some mag wheels (Couldnt do Cragars and Keystones because they wouldnt fit down on the balancer head.
But we could do most of the slotted wheels. Dad didnt care about mag wheels because they were only on the cars that kids had and not a lot of them out there. Plus kids didnt have money to pay for balancing! lol
Adaptors came later for mag wheels and I still have one of them as well! Although when using them the balancing was more touchy to do.

Well heres how I was taught back in the 70s.
The tire had to be mounted on a standard rim.
All weights were removed from front and back. Still should do today
All the balancers we had, had a small triangle or dot on the bubble head for valve stem location. (never understood why)
Now the head was in a locked position for sitting the tire on the balancer. But once the tire was placed on the head assembly with valve pointing to that dot there was a handle on the side that released the head assembly, and the head would go into a floating position (there is a fluid that the head floats on) allowing the heaviest side of the tire to drop.
The bubble goes to the lightest side of the head.
I was taught to use that bubble as the starting point of my triangle and imagine an equal triangle drawn on the rim. The other 2 corners of the triangle would be where my weights would go. (And of course that was towards the heavier side)
Now depending on how far out the balance was would make up how much weight you would use. The bubble had a small circle on it that if it was inside that bubble it usually only needed small weights on the front side of the wheel. But if the tire was way out you would need to put weights on both back and front.
So once I could see how much weight I needed I would take 2 equal weights and sit them just beyond the rim edge on the front side of the tire at the 2 triangle spots fartherest away from the first triangle point and watch the bubble. i would then change the weights trying to center the bubble going heavier or lighter just as you would using a level. I could moved the weights slightly left or right but always keep the triangle position. Usually I would go up to 1.5 ounce weights on the front but if that wasnt enough then weights went on back side as well.
If weights were needed on the back side I would first (keeping my triangle in mind) put a second set of equal weight just above the first weights i had put behind the rims edge. Now I would have 2 sets of weights sitting back to back on the front of rim. Once the bubble centered I would mark with chalk, the spots on wheel that required the weight. Remove the wheel from balancer. And then put on my front weights and then place the back side weights directly around the back of rim behind the front weights. I wasnt allowed to hammer the weight on the front of the rim while on the balancer!
Tire balanced and onto the car!

After rereading this I see I will need to add some pics to help explain. I will try to do that this weekend. I need to dig out the balancer from the corner of the forgotten tools! lol

Rod7515, I'm about the same age as you and I learned the triangle method when I worked at a gas station (back when most of them did repairs, of course) while in high school.

I should clarify my comment "whether it's any good". Bubble balancing works, in my opinion. I'm just not too confident in what our friends from China made in that HF thing I have now. lol

I should add however, that I have had trouble with light tires/wheels. I tried using lighter springs on the balancer to see if that would make it more sensitive. I still get front end wobble.
Last Spring, I balanced 2 M/T ET R's and just checked them. They're still good. The part I don't trust is, is it balanced just because the bubble is centered in that POS?

Just wanted to post a way to fix one.

Speedthrills, You point out something very very important. Before you start and put a wheel on the balancer you have to center the bubble on the balancer by adjusting the jacks on the bottom of the balancer.
Very good point I forgot to mention!
Rod

The bearing that the hat sits on isn't too good in those H-F balancers. Extra friction or any kind of binding at that bearing is going to cause some inaccuracy. You may be lucky and get a good one, but like you said, who knows?

Thanks!! I hope you guys will get a few photos up and refine this a bit. "At my old age" I have both a HF changer and an "aged" manual changer. And an old bubble balancer that someone "didn't" glue a new level to. I didn't realize this until it fell off. So I'll have to replace that They also use these stick on levels for things like tripods and campers, and some of the less expensive transit levels

I have a 53 year old BADA.
Still works perfect. It is soon to be a table. Fitting a mag wheel and a glass top.
I bought a hofmann computerized balancer. Dont like it. But it does everything and bada is limited. No one ever explained the triangle method. Will revisit it again.

I remember as a kid watching the triangle method being used.

I was able to get some pics of the balancer. Thought about throwing a tire and wheel on it to show some balancing but the 10* weather was more then I could bare!
So here's the bubble balancer model I was taught on. As you can see its base is made in a triangle style with screw adjusters on the 3 bottom corners. I would put the tire on the balancer head and level the bubble to start.

Here you can see the bubble head and the circle and valve stem mark in the head.


When you sit a wheel on the top the main body drops down and since its a cone style it keeps the wheel centered on the hub. Again it was to cold to find a wheel and tire to show this!

Once I got to this point I would push the black lever on the side to release the head to the floating position. This is where I said the head floats in a fluid as seen below

I'll try to add pics of wheel and tire on balancer once it gets warmer. But this is the bubble balancer from years past. A lot of older guys think this was a better way to balance because the weight is not all at one spot and it makes a smoother transition as the wheel rotates. I've balanced and checked between the 2 (spin and bubble) and it doesn't seem to matter which one its balanced on the other way says its not balanced. But both do the job in an acceptable result!

Rod

Just in case there's any confusion; the circular bubble levels on the link I posted to Amazon are an EXACT replacement for the original. At least on the HF balancer I have.

Rod, the HF balancer seems to be calibrated by adjusting the bubble level itself, with the 3 screws shown in the picture. The bubble level is spring mounted.

Speedthrill, I have never used the harbor freight balancer but I would think that as long as your bubble is leveled before start you should be good. As for your front end wobble, the biggest improvement was the ability to watch the tire spin on a coned shaft which would allow you to see how much run out or out of roundness the tire you were working with had. The bigger the tire the more out of roundness I have run into. But all in all todays manufacturing is much better and more consistent then in the past. Even the round, black and holds air tires from over seas are usually decent!
Then there's the new road force balance which I have no first hand experience with thats supposed to eliminate issues like you described are out there but much more expensive to have done. And from what I hear are not fixing the issue just finding out its a bad tire? Again I have no first hand experience with one.
Rod

Having them

rod7515 said:

Speedthrill, I have never used the harbor freight balancer but I would think that as long as your bubble is leveled before start you should be good. As for your front end wobble, the biggest improvement was the ability to watch the tire spin on a coned shaft which would allow you to see how much run out or out of roundness the tire you were working with had. The bigger the tire the more out of roundness I have run into. But all in all todays manufacturing is much better and more consistent then in the past. Even the round, black and holds air tires from over seas are usually decent!
Then there's the new road force balance which I have no first hand experience with thats supposed to eliminate issues like you described are out there but much more expensive to have done. And from what I hear are not fixing the issue just finding out its a bad tire? Again I have no first hand experience with one.
Rod

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I agree, I turn the screws until the bubble's in the middle, then put the wheel/tire on it.
Having them balanced (the light wheels) on a local shop's computer balancer helped a lot. I still feel a little wobble at certain highway speeds. It's funny though, at the track, it runs 118 and I don't feel a thing. I guess because it doesn't maintain given speed at the track?

Interesting discussion. I too worked for years in a shop where we used this same bubble balancer. It worked 99% of the time. Only once did we have a customer come back with a high speed vibration. We had to send it out to be spin balanced which cured the problem. I appreciate your technique in "splitting' the weights. We took that one step further. Knowing that the imbalance can be on the inside of the wheel or the outside, we split the weight 4 ways. Whatever weight was needed, it was split 4 ways, two weights on the outside and two weights on the inside. It does work.

rod7515 said:

I was able to get some pics of the balancer. Thought about throwing a tire and wheel on it to show some balancing but the 10* weather was more then I could bare!
So here's the bubble balancer model I was taught on. As you can see its base is made in a triangle style with screw adjusters on the 3 bottom corners. I would put the tire on the balancer head and level the bubble to start.
View attachment 1715130153
Here you can see the bubble head and the circle and valve stem mark in the head.

View attachment 1715130158
When you sit a wheel on the top the main body drops down and since its a cone style it keeps the wheel centered on the hub. Again it was to cold to find a wheel and tire to show this!
View attachment 1715130159
Once I got to this point I would push the black lever on the side to release the head to the floating position. This is where I said the head floats in a fluid as seen below
View attachment 1715130197
I'll try to add pics of wheel and tire on balancer once it gets warmer. But this is the bubble balancer from years past. A lot of older guys think this was a better way to balance because the weight is not all at one spot and it makes a smoother transition as the wheel rotates. I've balanced and checked between the 2 (spin and bubble) and it doesn't seem to matter which one its balanced on the other way says its not balanced. But both do the job in an acceptable result!
View attachment 1715130211 View attachment 1715130212
Rod

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Man seeing your picture brings back memories, Looks like the one I learned on at the EXXON station. Great job as a teen. Now that most of the gas stations are self serve and have no repair bays these entry level jobs for kids are lost. A great learning experience gone!

Murray, its obvious that I cant explain things very well. In post#6 I tried to say multiple weights on front and if needed multiple weights on back as well but I failed at getting that across. Thanks for clarifying that.
Rod