Tires have a light mark—usually a round marking.
The common advice is to align this light mark on the tire with the wheel’s air valve.
However, when you assemble it this way, you often end up adding an excessive amount of weight.
Zero balance becomes a distant dream.
Why is that?
Balance the wheel’s heavy point with the tire’s light point.
You can kind of imagine that the wheel’s heavy point is where the air valve is (*´ω｀*).
However, that’s only the case with aftermarket wheels—it’s almost never true otherwise.
The idea is to cancel out the imbalance by pairing a heavy point with a light point.
Heavy point paired with heavy point = wildly out of balance ( ﾟДﾟ).
This is the amount of balance weight that was stuck on my Inazuma 1200.
My eyes went bad for a moment.
I honestly think it’s better not to apply any weight at all, even as a workaround.
Just check the heavy and light points on the wheel by itself.
The air valve is positioned almost straight up.
If you align the tire’s light mark with it, you end up with light-to-light, which could also mean heavy-to-heavy, resulting in terrible imbalance.
If you check the wheel’s heavy and light points and pair them with the tire accordingly, I think you’ll reduce waste.
Of course, we still have to trust the tire’s light mark, so there are still some unknowns (/ω), but doing what we can should make things better.
