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Factory tire (observation)

Joined
Sep 4, 2023
Messages
32
Location
Southeastern PA
Took the 125 out for a rip to meet up with a buddy a few miles down the road. Bike has about 10 miles total on it. At about 30mph the front end "bounces" noticeably like the wheel is unbalanced or tire is out of round. I have Shinko's coming so no big deal, it's a glorified scooter. I'll take care of it when I swap the tires. Just something I observed, and it's not the first time it's happened on one of my bikes. interesting.
 

SneakyDingo

Well-known member
Joined
Aug 6, 2021
Messages
1,573
Took the 125 out for a rip to meet up with a buddy a few miles down the road. Bike has about 10 miles total on it. At about 30mph the front end "bounces" noticeably like the wheel is unbalanced or tire is out of round. I have Shinko's coming so no big deal, it's a glorified scooter. I'll take care of it when I swap the tires. Just something I observed, and it's not the first time it's happened on one of my bikes. interesting.

You can make a makeshift wheel truing stand on your bike using zip ties if you're just trying to check the roundness of the rim. Put the bike on the center stand, then put something heavy like a bag of rice on the rear rack (don't use a bucket of water, it might splash everywhere), which will lift the front wheel off the ground.

Attach a small zip tie to the horizontal bracing portion of the front fender, so it lines up with the edge of the rim, then rotate the front tire watching for changes in distance. If the zip tie indicates that your rim is either not radially or laterally true (away from center trueness, and left-right trueness), you'll see it as a change in gap on the zip tie.

I haven't heard of this being the case on the OEM tires, but I know with the SR244's if you don't mount them properly the wheel will "bounce" at around 30 mph, and a handful of people have mentioned this happening with the 2.5" SR244's. For me it was a visible difference in height of the tire relative to the fender when I was riding along, but I wouldn't recommend doing that - it wasn't a safe procedure to do to look down and pay more attention to my tire-fender gap than the road I was riding on.

To resolve this, you can remove the front wheel, break the bead off the rim but don't remove the tire, then re-seat it properly by using tire bead lube (e.g. soapy water, the actual lube product, etc.), inflating it and re-seating the bead that way. For me, that involves taking the wheel and bouncing it against the ground (as in removing the front wheel axle, physically taking the whole wheel and bouncing it against the ground a bunch of times). Someone else suggested using a mallet, I found a mallet wasn't enough to get it to seat properly for me.
 

JPMcGraw

Active member
Joined
Apr 13, 2022
Messages
102
mine was the rim with the stock tire. I used the zip tie method mentioned above to true the front rim and everything was good to go
 
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