Boy Bill, we could open up a complete new volume on this one. I went thru this exercise back in 2005-2006 when I brought my 1950, 3600 home. In the interest of keeping everything as original as possible I decided the very first thing that I would do, was replace the old dry rotted tires with five brandy new ones. My two piece 15” rims were in amazingly good shape, very little rust and not all dinged up. I had them blasted and I repainted them with good PPG DBU paint. I live out in the middle of the state, mostly farm country and my tire dealer I’ve been using for several decades. They were used to working with the two and three piece truck rims and they installed my New Power King tires, new tubes, new flaps.
They said they had one ell of a time balancing them. After bringing them home and installing them on the truck it hopped all over the place so I drove it back up to the dealer and gave him the truck. They rebalanced them again and I still had the hopping which came in at about 35 and maxed out at around 40 and got better after about 45mph. Something was setting up a vibration that resonated with the natural flexing of the trucks frame or springs. At that point I found another tire dealer that had a brand new (less than a year old) Hunter Road Force Balancer. Had them rebalanced by them and still had the same vibration at 40mph that was there before.
At this point I decided to check the run out of the wheel hubs, rims, tire side walls and tread myself. Being a half arsed good machinist I set up the dial indicators and logged all the run out in chart form for all four wheels. I did a lot of research on what was a realistic expectation for run out and nothing was out of spec. That was four years ago so don’t ask for the numbers, they’re long gone. The other constant problem with the Power King bias plys was the flat spots. After setting for a spell it would take 10-15 miles before they would round out. The first drive in the morning would literally shake your teeth out, the front fenders and hood would bounce around so bad at first that I thought it was going to knock the bulbs out or shake a fender loose.
After a few months of this I finally gave in and put some new Cooper Radial LT SRM II tires mounted on a nice set of 70’s eight bolt 16.5” rims. Did the run out check on them also and had the same results, all with in specs, no bent rims, no bent axle flanges and no lumpy tire tread. They gave the truck a 100% better feeling and no lumpy tires in the morning. But that vibration at 40 was still there which lead me to a couple of weeks of intense measurements checking the drive shafts, u-joints and other rotating part of the drive line, nota thing bent or out of balance.
Never did find the problem and the truck has been down for a year and a half now with other things getting in the way.
I’d gladly take all of my tires in to have them trued up if I could find someone locally that had on of those machines. Would only do it with them off the truck though. That has to be a much more stable way than a portable unit.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
