So, I installed the "like new" MTs and it turned my truck into an earthquake. Once we dismounted and put them up on the balancer, you can clearly see that they were not round! I put the worst ones on the rear and aired the tires down to 18 psi and that made the truck drivable until I found a new set.
My questions are these:
1. Is this a common issue? According to a quick Google search, it is. I love the look of the MTs so I'd like to keep them.
2. While the max air pressure is 50 psi, the fender markings call for 20/25 on most light HMMWVs. Is this why, and what are most owners running in terms of air pressure?
I like what I see to true them up nice creativity and work!
I can tell you that my M998 with the Goodyear tires came to me driving smooth at all speeds.
I balanced sets for other people and all of them have come out driving smooth
I have the Hunter road force touch balancer GSP9700 and the truck adapter set that fits like a glove into the wheel centers
unless you are able to find a shop with this combination you will probably not get a good balance on any 37" tire. The 20k+ GSP9700 is the best tire balancer on the planet and it does not come with the truck cone set which I think I paid about 1800 just for them a few years ago. I think it uses the same adapter as the GM trucks as I recall. There is a web page to locate shops that have the GSP9700 machine but you will need to ask them if they have that specific truck adapter set which does the 8 lug trucks and maybe even 10 lug I forget. The cone adapter part that goes on the inside of the wheel is hub-centric and it also mounts the face of the wheel by the lug holes at the same time.
I can tell you that I know people at a few local Jeep/Ram dealerships and they will not pay for this type of equipment.
They have referred those customers to us with the lifted trucks and larger tires to balance them.
the GSP9700 will tell you if it will not be able to be balanced smoothly it measures multiple levels of harmonics and gives actual road force numbers and when on the balancer you can easily see if the tires are out of round. It will also do a centering check so if it passes the centering check the wheel is mounted correctly on the machine it measures runout. I own a small off road shop and it took over 5 years to start making a profit doing tire work but at the end of the day when the vehicles do not run smooth down the road the customer is not happy so it was a necessity. We have tried balance beads and centramic rings I can tell you in my opinion the balance beads almost always do not do a good job and the centrimatic rings have been hit or miss but do seem to work better than the beads alone I think they only correct one of the three harmonics though
on another note when you own one of these machines you can see who makes the better tires and overall Goodyear is one of the worst when it comes to balancing them across the board on all of their tires
an out of round tire will increase the road force number and I was told any mud tire over 60# of road force is defective and BFG will replace tires at that number
I have seen a new Goodyear MTR come up at over 300 lbs of road force
I have driven them up to maybe 70lbs if its only 1 tire on the back and they run pretty smooth to me
I have also driven on tires that were under vehicles that did not move in a long time "years" and the flat spots even after 10k of trying they never went away so pretty much if they have flat spots that don't go away after maybe 100 miles of driving they will probably never go away unless you can find a place to do the tire truing or build your own setup
)