What Does a Red or Yellow Dot on Your Tires Mean?
- Thread starter Lambeau
- Start date
Just call around and ask if tire shop has a Hunter Road Force balancer. Ask them what limit they usually like to see on the tire size you are looking at. If they can't give you a good answer (and quickly, like they know what they are talking about), they probably don't really use the RF balancer correctly and/or take the extra time it takes to check RF, or improve RF with the "procedure".
Hunter claims 26 lbf is the limit on P tires, and 40 lbf on LT tires. I like to see 10 or under on P tires and 15 or under on LT's. Not always easy to get as many tires are made hit or miss. One might be 8 lbf Road force, while another might be 58 Lbf (referring to LT tires, which are always higher than P tires)).
My brand new F250 had two that were 56 and 58 lbf. Thing vibrated like crazy. Ford would only get it down to 35 front, 45 rear. I ended up buying two tires on my own dime, and also using the spare (which ironically was the best of all the tires I had) ended up with 7, 8 (front), 13, and 17 (rear) RF's #'s, all said and done. 1000 % improvement.
On the other end of the scale, just put two Continental, nothing special A/S tires, on the front of our 17 escape. One was 5, one was 6 lbf each, not even performing the RF procedure (just having machine check it, which you can see # in lower right hand corner of screen below).
A pic of the machine. The "big" difference is the roller seen in pic, presses up agains't tire with 1400 lbs of force, which acts like it is on the road. It then measures dynamic radial runout of the tire while spinning, and converts that number to a force "variation". The lower the variation, the lower vibration you should see (that's the theory anyway).
The "newer" models, can also measure side force on the tire, to see if it will pull to left/right once on the car. I have not played with that part much, as I don't really have any issues with pull, due to tires (also have my own alignment system/rack, so if I have a pull, I just dial in more caster and/or fix thrust angle in rear)
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I hate doing that Road Force shit. Especially under GM warranty. It pays crap. Lots of extra work for not much pay. We usually give that stuff to our shop foreman and let him sort it out. It makes me more money and the shop makes more money. The shop foreman's pay is based on productivity and no one is productive playing the Road Force game. Some of the worst tires for balance are Bridgestone Tires when 20" dia or larger. And GM does not allow you to change tire brands or type under warranty.
Yeah, didn't GM have crappy truck frames for a while, so they made a ridiculous low RF limit, to compensate for their crap frames?? (or something like that)
Feel bad for you guys in the field, doing this right can take a crapload of time. Even the new machines (RF Elite), that are supposed to use lasers, (which there is no way they can accurately measure outer bead surface, on modern wheels), says to take tire off rim and measure bead mount surfaces, IF you have an issue with RF #'s.
I looked it up in the Hunter RF Elite instruction manual, trying to figure out how a laser could measure today's outer wheel bead, when the outsides of wheels are decorative, not machined in any way at all.
Anyway, I've always wanted one to help weed out bad tires. I use that, tire runout, total balance weight, and visual on my old balancer (which has no hood) to judge a tire, all before putting it on car/truck.
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