 Wheels - Auxiliary Assembly
Those were the days when even authorized VW workshops didn't have any of the mounting devices that are common today. Of course, tires were taken off the rim or assembled onto the rim. How did that go? Slightly brutal,
one would say today and thus does the method some injustice.
So the valve out and the tires were pushed inwards towards the low bed. There were also easier-to-work on with hoses, so no humps with rims. Then the tire iron put forth on at one point and levered the bead over the edge
of the rim by 180° to the outside. At the same time, care was taken to ensure that this was on the opposite side in the low bed.
And then the hardness came into play, because now the remaining bead was worked on with the hammer and more and more of it was pushed outwards over the rim flange. Of course, the paint could be damaged at the
respective attachment point of the tire iron and especially when mounting the new tire, but that was obviously accepted.
Basically, this simple mounting device (picture above) is a solution that puts even a little more strain on the paint on the rim. In the case of steel rims, the protection of the rim is also waived here. However, the mounting iron,
for example, has an intermediate piece made of plastic towards the alloy rim. Then you can actually no longer find any disadvantage in the assembly with this device.
How good that it is not sold in Germany. So we save ourselves the suspicion that we would advertise for it. The balancing device is almost even more simple, at least compared to what is common today, for example in the
tire trade. Nothing rotates.
Wheels with different sized openings in the middle are simply put on from above until they are centered by the cone shape in the middle. The four rods with the coil springs ensure that the wheel is positioned more or less
horizontally.
It is important to have a kind of dragonfly, comparable to that of a water spirit level. Only that water is provided here in a slightly dome-shaped transparent form with an air bubble. The aim is to bring the air bubble exactly to the
center. In addition, a ring is drawn in, with which this can be achieved a little more precisely.
How do you do that? You have to know that this entire device is not rigidly screwed to a vertical rod, but can be easily tilted in all directions. And this is exactly where the arrangement works with the balancing weights, which
you have to distribute correctly until the air bubble fits exactly into the circle.
If there were no objections to this method, a workshop with relatively infrequent tire fitting could save a lot of money. Well, we can't say much about the accuracy here. And as long as the wheel does not exceed a certain width,
this method of balancing can, in principle, bring good results.
But, you have to realize that this is only for the elimination of static imbalances. What is missing are the dynamic ones. These are the ones that give the wheel a certain wobbling movement because there are larger
concentrations of masses outside of a plane that runs through the middle of the rim and tire of a stationary wheel, for example when viewed from the front. The weights that are usually attached to the rim from the inside are
responsible for this.
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