Team-BHP - Tyre rotation

I have already posted one link (car talk) about why Wheel Balancing is not necessary every 5000 kms.

Here is one more
Installation - Ride-On

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Q: How often should I have the wheel balance be checked?

A: A wheel should be balanced whenever a tire is demounted and replaced (changing its relative position on the wheel), when a balance weight is moved or removed, and whenever you purchase new tires. Of course, at the first sign of vibration or irregular tread wear, your car should be thoroughly checked for wheel balance and alignment, and for worn or broken mechanical parts.

Why will a set of 4 balanced tyres become unbalanced? 5000 kms of wear & tear is not enough to cause to wheels to become unbalanced enough to require rebalancing.

Another way to check if you require balancing is that if tyres are unbalanced, your car will start vibrating when you start driving around 70-80 kmph - if it doesn't it's very likely they are balanced. Even if you want to do it at a periodic interval, 15000km or 20000km seems more sensible than 5000km.

The OEM JK Tyres on my swift were replaced only after 53000 kms. Even at that point, they the treads were good enough. I replaced them only because it people said you need to replace at 50000 km. They would have easily gone for another 3-4000kms. I balanced them only once in those 53000 kms (before I googled around and realized that periodic balancing was not necessary).

Another thing which lot of tyre shops do when you give it to them for rebalancing.
They assume all the tyres need balancing & remove all the weights & then put them on the machine & balance them.
A better way is to put the wheels on the machine with the existing weights & check first if they are unbalanced. Many a times only one or two tyres would need balancing & weights can be added/removed only to those.

Also, yet another link - http://cars.cartalk.com/content/colu...ctober/15.html

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My dealer says my wheels must be re-balanced each time each time he rotates the tires. The tire manufacturer says the wheels should only be balanced when the tires are mounted or remounted. My dealer got a little huffy when I told him that, but he couldn't explain why. Who is right? Hank
Ray: Gee, Hank, I'd get huffy too if someone caught me with my hand in the cookie jar. Your dealer's theory runs counter to Newton's First Law of Rotation: Tires in balance tend to stay in balance (that's Vinnie Newton, the mechanic, not Issac, the Physicist).
Tom: Rotating the tires doesn't affect the balance, because you're just moving the tires--rims and all--from one place on the car to another. And trust me on this, once the tires are balanced, they don't have any idea where they are.
Ray: But just to be sure, we always blind fold the tires when we move them around our shop.
Tom: Obviously, if you ever took a tire off a rim and re-mounted it on another rim, you'd have to balance it again.
Ray: Or if you hit a huge pothole, or drove into a curbstone, it's possible to knock a weight off the wheel and throw the balance off. But that's pretty rare.
Tom: By and large, tires stay balanced. And if the balance goes off for any reason, you'd probably know about it because the car would shimmy or vibrate, particularly at higher speeds.
Ray: Actually, I almost forgot the one legitimate reason for balancing tires every time you rotate them; kids in college. The dealer's kids, that is. It takes nearly 20,581 tire balancings to get a kid through MIT these days...and that's not including books and student activity fees! 1669

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Originally Posted by carboy (Post 2629576)

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:uncontrol

I think what I'd want to try next time is to check the tyre condition for balancing requirement before they take the weights off, that's when we'd safely be able to say if balancing is really needed every 5-10k kms or not.

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Originally Posted by fine69 (Post 2638792)

+1. I have done this a couple of times, and found that there is rebalancing required with minor additional weights for some wheels. Will check the next time again!

Tyres also contribute to wheel balancing, and at the very least, tires wear out over 10k (if not 5k km). This can cause change in wheel/tyre combo balance. Also, with Indian road conditions, and the tens of significant impacts the wheels take over our roads, I wouldn't bet that balancing is perfect once done, and never needs to be done again. That's myopic in IMHO.

@kutts, I agree with you here. Why wait till the problem causes wobbling ? Imagine you're on a 500km drive on a holiday, and your wheels start wobbling in a village! Prevention is better than cure.

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Originally Posted by sdp1975

I rotated my tyres ( front to back ) at 41 K a few days back on my Punto - also got them balanced and aligned. The last rotation was @30K. Reason for rotation was that the front tyres were wearing out faster than the rear ones - as seen by tread depth. Tyres are old anyway and will possibly last another 5K or so.

Now I'm getting a vibration at around 40 kph. What could be the reason ? Speeds above and below 40kph are OK.

Should I get them rotated back again ?

I think your tyres are already worn out. Also, I would check the balancing alignment again along with a careful inspection of your rims because if one or other of your rims are bent, this vibration can happen.

Typically, one would rotate tyres every 5000 kms and would cross them over, meaning the right front tyre will end up on the rear left and so on. And the left front tyre would bypass its position at the rear right side and move straight to the boot while bringing the spare into play.

If you follow tyre balancing, wheel alignment and rotation every 5000 kms in a diligent manner, you will see your tyres lasting for absolutely ages and they will give you lots of driving pleasure as well. I recommend eery 5000 kms because our Indian road surfaces, whether urban, rural or highway are invariably not even and generally filled with potholes and lateral trenches and all sorts of such things, all of which knock the alignment and balancing completely out of kilter very quickly indeed.

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Originally Posted by carboy (Post 2629576)

I agree that if you consistently drive on our good state and national highways, balancing can be put off a bit. However, most of us drive on what can only be called the surface of the moon. Such wonderful roads with a pothole every 10 meters or so is not exactly conducive to good tyre balance. I can see the difference between my needs for tyre balancing of my vehicles in Coorg and Bangalore. Come to think of it, I know people whose tyre life on any vehicle in Coorg never exceeded 10,000 km. Particularly bad stretch of roads they drove on regularly

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Originally Posted by shankar.balan (Post 2942064)

Reversed the rotation today and the sound is gone. There's no problem with the alloys , they're fine. Appears that 2 of the tyres have gone bad ( ran a Road Force test @ Nikhil's training centre On Kanakpura road).

I was doing the alignment and balancing every 5K, but was doing the rotation ( front to back ) every 15K as per the owners manual - and now I realize that doing it every 5K would make much more sense.

Tyre's are anyway at the end of their life @42,600 KM- will have to change them soon. Was never happy with the GT3's.

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Originally Posted by sdp1975 (Post 2949202)

and now I realize that doing it every 5K would make much more sense.

Tyre's are anyway at the end of their life @42,600 KM- will have to change them soon. Was never happy with the GT3's.

Do it every 5K and see the difference for yourself.
My Scorpio tyres had lasted 50K when I sold it and they were still as good as new (pretty much). My pal has been using that vehicle over this last one year and he has added another 15-18K Kms and they would have easily completed 75K Kms.
It is only now, that he decided to change the tyres and has bought some new ones. My old Bridgestones are now doing duty on his estate trailers...

Another pal of mine used his Scorpio Bridgestone tyres for more than 70K ams without a problem.

Goodyears are generally softer so I guess 42000 to 45000 kms is a very decent life overall for them.

Hi BHP-ians,

While the issue of 5 tyre rotation seems to have been explored extensively here, haven't seen anything with respect to new cars where OEMs provide 4 alloys and a steel rim for the 5th (spare), all with identical tubeless tyres - given such a car and the 5-wheel-rotation-every-5000KMs strategy, at least 2 tyres will have to be dismounted and remounted onto the swapped rims (steel to allow and alloy to steel).

I'm curious whether such frequent dis/re-mounting (every 5000 KMs) would have a detrimental effect on the tyres/rims?

Also, given that a tyre would be going from alloy-rim -> steel-rim -> alloy-rim over the course of successive rotations, would that cause damage to a (tubeless) tyre?

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Originally Posted by Travis (Post 3368830)

In case of four alloy wheels the fifth steel wheel is meant only for emergency run. And the alloy wheels must be repaired and put back. The steel wheel is never expected to do a full time job

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Originally Posted by sagarpadaki (Post 3370056)

In case of four alloy wheels the fifth steel wheel is meant only for emergency run. And the alloy wheels must be repaired and put back. The steel wheel is never expected to do a full time job

yes, I understand that, which is why I mentioned the dis/re-mounting of the tires during a 5-wheel rotation cycle.

eg: assume 5 identical tires (T1-5)

-----------------Front----------------
Alloy1-T1--------------------Alloy2-T2

Alloy3-T3--------------------Alloy4-T4

Spare-steel-T5
-----------------Rear------------------

After a rotation cycle:

-----------------Front----------------
Alloy4-T4---------------------Alloy3-T3

Alloy1-T1---------------------Alloy2-T5

Spare-steel-T2
-----------------Rear------------------

3 Tires (1,3,4) stay on their respective alloys during this rotation.
Tire T2 goes from Alloy2 to Steel
Tire T5 goes from Steel to Alloy2

The Steel rim continues as spare - not main duty

(And so on in consecutive rotation cycles)

But as you see, 2 tires were dismounted from their respective rims and then mounted on another. This will happen at every rotation cycle (interval of 8k-10k KMs depending on your cycle time). And it is in this respect that I ask if it is a good idea to do this.

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Originally Posted by Travis (Post 3371253)

I got your point.

What i am telling is , in case of spare wheel being steel, that wheel is not intended to be brought into continuous use. If you have a flat , you use the steel spare and as soon as you repair the alloy wheel tyre you put it back.

Changing the rims between steel and alloy is not usually done. You can do it. No problem. No damage will happen to the tyre or the rim since you will be doing it once in 5K kms.

A better solution is to buy a spare alloy too. With that your problem will be permanently solved :)

Hi Guys

My Swift Vxi is 7 years old (2007 Sep model) and done 35k. Still using the OEM tires themselves - had just one puncture on left front about an year ago. My driving is 65% in the city & 25% on NICE toll road; rest on the occasional highway runs.

Regularly getting it serviced and the previous bills show that they've been doing alignment. I'm no-a-days feeling that I need to maintain the steering toward the right a bit 'cause on plain road and hands free driving, the car veers slightly to the left (I drove at low speeds in a deserted stretch - promise!)

While checking for something (lot of clatter coming in from the boot due to some loosely fitted tools), was kind of taken aback to see that the spare tyre was looking brand new & shining. I was expecting that as per the manual the M.A.S.S guys would be doing the tyre rotation whenever I gave it for service, looks like they haven't been doing that.

I know, I know - I should've taken care of this from my side too - but I travel frequently and don't always hand off the car for service myself.. Thats a lame excuse, but there it is. stupid:

Could you advice if rotating the tires is a good option - if yes, do I go for the Maruti recommended 4 tire swap or 5 tire swap? [[ Off topic: Surprisingly (or not would be a better word) - the Maruti manual for Swift & DZire is the same - is this indeed the case or some tech boffin uploaded the wrong file to the wrong link? ]]

Or do I need to go for a new set of tires & discard the spare tire - that almost brand new.

Thanks a ton in advance.

Cheers!