Tire Balancing in Las Vegas, NV
The Advantages of Tire Balancing
Tire balancing protects your tires and provides you with benefits such as:
- A smoother driving experience: If your tires are sufficiently balanced, you’ll minimize vibrations on the road.
- Increased safety: Poorly balanced tires often suffer from uneven tread wear and bald spots, but tire balancing can help you avoid these dangers.
- Enhanced gas mileage: Tires can’t drive evenly when imbalanced, but wheel balancing will minimize their workload — and help you save at the pump.
- A longer tire life span: Wheels with uneven tread wear might need to be replaced early, but that’s not usually the case for well-maintained tires.
Know When To Balance Tires
The key to scheduling a tire balancing service is knowing when you’re due for another crucial tire maintenance service — tire rotation. Tire rotation focuses on moving each wheel on your vehicle to a different spot, allowing your tires to wear as evenly as possible.
For tire rotation to provide the expected benefits, you’ll need to schedule this service regularly. Typically, you should get tire rotation taken care of every 3,000-6,000 miles (or whenever you get your oil changed). This is also a convenient time to get tire balancing done.
Schedule a Tire Balancing Service
Do You Need Tire Balancing Ahead of Schedule?
Though creating a schedule for tire balancing should help keep your wheels in balance most of the time, things can still go wrong in between appointments. Since you can’t gauge the weight of your tires by looking at them, familiarize yourself with these red flags:
- Unexpected sounds: Loud noises can point to all kinds of issues with your vehicle, and that includes balancing problems. To help narrow things down, remember that sounds associated with unbalanced tires tend to be extremely loud and will come from below your vehicle.
- Vibrations in your car: Vehicle vibrations may be annoying, but they can also determine which of your tires are out of balance. If you need front tire balancing, your steering wheel might start vibrating. Unbalanced tires on your rear axle can cause your seats to vibrate.
- Bouncing while you drive: Is your car bouncing more than you’d reasonably expect? If it is, your tires may be out of balance. That’s especially true if you’re driving on a highway or another surface where you’d generally be able to enjoy a smooth ride.
Your car’s tires can only live up to their full potential when they’re working alongside three other identical wheels. You’ll want these components to resemble each other as closely as possible, which means the weight of your tires is a big deal. While each wheel included in a new set of tires will weigh the same amount, that could gradually change due to the wear and tear associated with regular driving.
Drivers in and around Las Vegas can’t afford to ignore unbalanced tires. This issue could easily lead to abnormal tread wear and other problems, so you’ll want to visit a nearby auto shop for tire balancing work. The pros at Tire Works Total Car Care specialize in tire maintenance, and we’d be happy to bring your wheels back into balance as soon as possible.
How Tire Balancing Works
When you set up an appointment for tire balancing, the mechanics will connect your tires to a piece of equipment aptly called a “wheel balancer”. This device will weigh your wheels and
carefully analyze their overall weight distribution.
If the wheel balancer finds that one or more of your wheels are imbalanced, your mechanics will start working to resolve this situation. As part of this process, they’ll use bonding cement to attach tiny weights to any underweight tires on your vehicle. By the time they’re done, your wheels will be properly balanced.
Finding a Shop for Wheel Balancing
For wheel balancing to provide the benefits it should, it needs to be handled with absolute precision. You can’t trust just anybody to inspect tires and balance them. If you don’t do your research beforehand, you could end up with less-than-ideal results.
The best Las Vegas auto shop for tire balancing (and any other tire maintenance tasks you might need) is Tire Works Total Car Care. At our shops, you’ll find:
Quality Workmanship
Whatever repair or maintenance task your vehicle needs, it should be handled by mechanics who know what they’re doing. Since ASE-certified mechanics are the most qualified people in this industry, finding a shop that employs them (like Tire Works) will always be in your best interest.
Complimentary Quotes
No one enjoys wondering how much their next auto maintenance appointment will cost. Before you visit our auto shops you are welcome to request a free auto repair estimate — that way, you’ll have an idea of the cost before work begins.
Opportunities To Save
While wheel balancing is a vital service, it is still an expense. To lessen the financial impact of auto maintenance and repair, we want to help our valued customers save money with online auto repair coupons and financing options.
Have more questions? Contact us today!
Schedule a Tire Balancing Service
Frequently Asked Questions
One of the most obvious ways to tell that your vehicle is due for tire balancing service is when you experience vehicle vibrations. While tire vibrations can be symptoms of other issues, vibrations from tire imbalance typically occur at highway speeds. Not to be mistaken with warped brake rotors, which only vibrate when you depress the brakes, vibrations from unbalanced tires occur constantly at high speeds, whether you are accelerating, cruising, or braking.
Here are a few more signs that your tires need to be balanced:
- Reduced fuel economy — this is typically because vibrating tires create an increased rolling resistance, which means your vehicle has to work harder to take you from point A to point B. As a result, you may notice a decrease in fuel economy if your tires need to be balanced.
- Uneven tire wear — unbalanced tires do not make even contact with the road. As a result, your tires can wear unevenly if the problem is left unresolved.
- Vibrating steering wheel — as your tires vibrate, they can send vibrations through the steering column and into your steering wheel. This phenomenon may cause your steering wheel to shake as you drive down the road.
The cost of a tire balancing service will typically run $50-$100. During a tire balancing service, one of our ASE-certified mechanics will remove your wheel and tire from your vehicle and place it on a special machine that measures your tire’s imbalance. From here, small counterweights are placed on the inside of your wheel to ensure that your tire can rotate smoothly and efficiently.
Because this service is minimal, the cost of the service typically is also minimal — which is why you’ll commonly find this service performed for less than $100. Although the service is relatively simple, it plays a major role in your tires’ overall longevity. To get an estimate of the service cost, you can contact us and request a service quote.
Unfortunately, because tire balancing is so simple, many drivers think they don’t need this important service and therefore skip it (which saves them some money in the short term). However, they’re later frustrated to hear that their tires need to be replaced because they skipped this service, and their tires have now worn unevenly. For this reason, we recommend balancing tires every 12,000 miles.
Believe it or not, unbalanced tires can hurt your transmission. Although tire balancing is mostly attributed to minor, uncomfortable vibrations, these vibrations can also cause harm to your transmission. If only one of your wheels is unbalanced and vibrating, it could cause your wheels to spin at different speeds. Though this seems relatively minor, having your wheels spin at different rates, especially if they are drive wheels, could put unnecessary strain on your transmission.
Because your transmission is one of the most expensive components of your vehicle and requires completely removing your engine to replace it, it is vitally important to ensure that all of your transmission components are in their best shape — and that includes the wheels that your transmission sends power to. To avoid potential problems with your transmission, we recommend performing a routine wheel balancing service to ensure that your wheels make constant contact with the road at the same speed.
Unbalanced tires wear faster than perfectly balanced tires. When your wheels are balanced, they make even contact with the road, which promotes even tire wear which in turn makes your tires last longer.
However, unbalanced tires may have uneven pressure points or points that make more constant contact with the road than others. To get the most life out of your tires, we recommend performing a tire balancing service once per year or every 12,000 miles. This service and other maintenance tasks such as proper tire inflation, routine tire rotation, and wheel alignment services can promote tire longevity and help you get the most life out of your tires.
If you happen to notice your vehicle is vibrating, we recommend scheduling an appointment to balance your tires ASAP. This can help prevent uneven tire wear and ensure that your tires continue to serve you for as long as possible.
