Anybody have any experience with getting wheels "road force" balanced, using a Hunter GSP 9700? Evidently its supposed to be state of the art and extremely effective at eliminating vibration, shimmy, etc.
Had this done on me Cobra R's and 35 series Yokahama's. Very smooth. I recommend it. Now, if you are running drag radials, don't bother. Tire "could" spin on the rim, plus they are only on the back of the car so not so important. When I put the BFG DR's on there, I didn't bother as the guy even told me not to bother.
I had the road force thing done on all four tires yesterday. I have to say I didn't really see any relief from the steering wheel shimmy that I'm experiencing, starting at about 50 MPH. I now do, however, understand why I've experienced this since rotating my tires. Both back tires (originally placed on the front of the car) have roundness numbers of about 9 lbs. Both of the fronts are up in the low 20s. The tire tech rotated each of the front tires on the rims to bring them down to those numbers. They were originally something like 28 lbs and 24 lbs. He recommended that if the vibration wasn't cured by doing that to consider having the tires trued. I think before I do that I'll rotate the tires again to get the most round ones (now on the back) to the front, and see if the shimmy is gone or at least improved.
When I had the SVT Chrome Wheels installed, my dealer used the Hunter GSP9700 Road Force machine to balance and road force check the tires. At the time I only had 900 miles on the car and they had to replace 2 of the original Goodyear F1's because even after trying to index the tires, the road force amount was still to high on those 2 tires. But to tell you the truth, I felt no vibration before the changeover. Must be a real sensitive machine. The tech doing the changeover said that 60% of all tires don't pass the road force test. Goes to show you how many bad tires the tire manufacturers are putting out nowadays.