Innovative Balancing, LLC (the creators of Dyna Beads) offered to send us a set of beads for our five new Nitto Trail Grapplers for testing. At 285/70/16 our tires are on the edge of benefiting from dynamic balancing. You see, dynamic balancing doesn’t work extremely well as the only solution for traditional street tires. Shorter, wider tires usually require some standard weights in addition to dynamic balancing products to adequately deal with lateral imbalance issues. It’s only when you get into the larger, more aggressive tires that the option of using dynamic balancing alone is realistic. Still, we agreed to test them in this scenario to see if they’d be a good fit for our upgraded tires.
So far we’ve put about 1,500 miles on our new tires with the Dyna Beads and they’ve worked perfectly for us. We did notice that sometimes when we leave a trail the tires will shake a little once we hit the main road. This is caused by mud & dirt getting jammed on the inside of the wheel and in the tire tread, which causes the beads to adjust appropriately. When that mud and dirt starts to fly off at highway speeds the beads stay put, which causes some imbalance. The simple fix is to stop the FJ for about 5 seconds so the beads can ‘reset’. Once this is done and we get back up to highway speeds, the balancing works perfectly.
We’ll update this report as we put more miles on these tires, but so far we’re very impressed with the beads. It should be noted once again that this product works best on larger, aggressive tires. If you’re running stock size, you may need additional standard weights to help with lateral imbalance issues.
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