Mounting & Balancing New Mickey Thompsons on Pin Drive Wheels

[patrickt]

Over the 4th of July I bought four new Mickey Thompson S/T tires. 295-50/15 and 235-60/15 and, since I have 6-pin drive wheels and the ERA big brake option, it's a slight PITA to get them mounted and balanced. This may help others.

I'm not going to write about the performance of the MT S/T tires as I've only driven on them once. I liked my old rock-hard Yokohamas and the MT S/T tires are almost exactly the same size, with the car now sitting only 1/32" higher both on the front and back end. I do like the looks of the MT S/T because when you mount the white letters inward the black wall side is really bland. Plus, I blackened out the white letters using Forever Black Bumper & Trim Dye and that made the white letters virtually invisible should you stick your head under the car and look. I really like a simple black tire and the MT S/T tires are pretty much that.

Changing and balancing pin drive wheels is not terribly hard, mostly you have to convince the tire guy that he can do it and search out the right machines. My guy used a Ranger Leverless Touch-Free Tire Changer and a Hunter GSP9700 Road Force Balancer. A small stabilizing rod has to be removed from the Ranger's tire mounting base because there are no lug bolt holes going through the wheel on pin drives. This is not hard but it requires a tire guy that is willing to try. That's pretty much it for changing the tire. Doing a road force balancing with the Hunter is done exactly like any other tire. It's a piece of cake... unless you have the ERA big brake option. Then you have to use really skinny weights. How skinny? Really, really skinny.

Since I brought my wheels and tires to the guy, I had him just balance one wheel with his skinniest weights and I took it back home and mounted it. When I put that test wheel on the front hub and spun it, I could hear it scrape on the caliper when it came around. When I pulled the wheel I could see that the three ½ ounce thin weights just barely scraped the caliper, while the single ¼ ounce weight did not. We replaced the scraping weights with the smaller ones. Here is a tell-tale pic of the weights along with a quick pic of the car with the new MTs on her. Really, just finding a tire guy that is willing to work with you is half the battle.