I just had Cooper STTs put on today to replace the Nitto Terra Grapplers, both are 325/60/18. The Coopers are load range E with 65 psi max and the Nittos are load range D, in the Nittos I ran 45 psi up front and 50 in the rear, but with these Coopers I am not quite sure what to run. I was thinking 55 in the front and 60 in the rear. What do you guys think?

Also the shop that did the install suggested balancing beads since the Coopers are a M/T and because of the size, so I had them install the beads and this is the first time I have had beads in any of my vehicles. I have only put 10 miles on driving home, but it has some kinda strange feedback on the drive. Everything is smooth until 50 mph, then I get some steering wheel shake after 1 min or so the shake is down to just a slight vibration. But once I hit a rough stretch of road the steering wheel will shake again for just a bit and then goes down to the slight vibration again. I know that my truck is going to handle different and also give different feedback through the steering wheel than before because of the knobby tread pattern, I have had M/Ts on other trucks in the past that were balanced normally and never had this happen. Is what I am describing normal with beads?

 

I've never used balancing beads, but I would think hitting a bump would knock some of them away from the direction the wheel moved and that it might take a bit of time for them to redistribute properly.

I think I'd give some consideration to having the wheels re-balanced with ordinary tire weights. I honestly don't see why your tires would need anything other than those.

- Jack

 

Run the same pressures you ran in the other tires, get rid of the beads and have them road force balanced. If any of them require a large amount of weights, "clock" the tires on the rims.

 

A lot of motorcycle riders use beads in their tires, especially the owners who change their own tires. It makes it easy for them to "balance" the tires. It probably works better with small tires such as motorcycle tires.

If it were me, I'd follow glc's advice.

 

Thanks for the input! I had the tires mounted at our local farmers co-op, where I buy almost all of my tires. They said that anything 33" or larger they use the beads, which he said is mostly sprayer truck tires (38s) and semi/dump truck/grain truck tires. We did look at the spin balancer but my Coopers are too wide and would not fit.

There is another tire shop about 30 miles away that I believe has a road force machine, I will check and see if they would be able to balance these tires are not.

 

Guessing that by now you've removed the beads in order to spin balance the tires .....

The beads work for tires with a 65 or taller aspect ratio like 70, 75 series.

At 60 or lower profiles, the inside of the tire is flat across the tread side to side so the beads may balance a tire in one plane while throwing it out in another plane as they can end up on the wrong side (left to right speaking).

Once spun balanced, wide tires can use a little bead balance to fine tune.

MC tires are balanced around the center always so beads work perfect there as well as in trailer tires, and car tires with 65 or taller aspect ratios.

 

After 2 calls to Counter Balance about my problem they sent me more bead to install in my tires, the customer service guy said it was possible that my tires didn't have enough bead in them to balance correctly. I told him the size and brand of tire I was running and he said that beads would work good for my application. I waited for almost 2 weeks for the extra beads to show up, then said heck with it and had my tires road force balanced. Ironically the beads showed up the day I had the tires balanced, so now I have four 4 oz bead packs sitting in my garage. I think they may make there way into the tires on one of my ATVs.

It ended up taking 2 guys 3 hours to remove the beads and road force my tires. They had to break down each tire a couple times and spin them on the rims to get the amount of weight down. I know 1 tire was at 23 oz of total weights needed, after breaking down and spinning the tire that one was down to 8oz. All the tires ended up taking any where from 8 to 12 oz to balance, I thought that was still a ton of weight but they said that was the lowest that they could get them down to.

I am now happy to say that I can drive the truck without any shake of the steering wheel or vibration through the seat of my pants. I have also noticed that the "bed bounce" seems to be greatly reduced even from when I had the Terra Grapplers on.