Wheel Balancing: No tech Training?

[pjlindsey]

Can anyone tell me if the technicians (the word may be a loose description for some of the shop workers) really know how to balance a tire?

I frequent two shops in my area, because I purchased the tires for each of my cars from different shops. For our 2000 Tahoe Limited, I went with a franchise of a national chain tire dealer and purchased the best tires they had. We put a lot of miles, mostly highway, on this truck (>70K/yr). For my old 88 Mazda MX-6 with 290K miles on it, I went with reasonably priced sale tires from Sears.

In both cases, I had to come back repeatedly to get the balance right. Here in NM, the interstate speed limit is 75, meaning that 78-80 is the norm.

Finally, I search the internet and found:
http://www.sts.sae.org/servicetech/j...-balancing.htm
I even downloaded and read the manual for the Coats 1055 balancer.

Using this link as a guide, I watched the tech do the balance, and when it finally read 0-0, had the tech rotate the wheel on the balancer spindle 180 degrees and spin it up again. If it didn't come up 0-0, I had the weights redone and tried again. I didn't accept the tire until it passed both spin-ups in a row.

Wow ... vibration problem gone.

So, back to my first three questions. Every time I've showed a tech the 180 deg balance check, I get a "gee, I've never heard of this" response. In one case, I've found a balancer that just wouldn't pass the test. We took the tires to a different machine and had no problems there, leading me to believe that the 1st machine was in need of maintenance.

If you just drive around the city, this problem is probably unnoticable, with the rough/potholed city roads. In fact, it was probably unnoticable (unless really bad) at the old double-nickel.

Since I'm not a shop owner, I can only guess that balancer training consists of "you know how to work this, don't you?", which most young employees will answer "sure", if only not to appear dumb.

If there are any shop owners/managers out there, I'd be interested in their opinions. From my point of view after reading the Coats manual, it sounds that it would be better from a standpoint of reducing customer "come-backs" to perform the match-mount balancing procedure every time a tire is mounted on a wheel. The resulting weights would be smaller, so if the tech gets the balance weight position off a little, it won't matter as much. It would take more time, but a frustrated customer who has to keep getting his tires rebalanced twice every time he comes back for the free rotation and balance (because the balance gets poorly done on the machine the first time) has a really high probability of looking for another shop when it comes time for new tires again.

[grider]

i am the forman at a national chain shop we sell tires and i have the same issue i was trained by hunter (on my dime)for both tires and alighnments and the amount of skill it takes to do it right the first time is very minimal but i have yet to find a shop or low level tech or gs that will spend the money to learn it and very few min wage gs care so its like trying to teach a dog to drive a car he just looks at you like an idiot so after a while you just give up