@ Peter & Mike. It’s all well and good to place the tire dot (sometimes painted dot) according to the tire valve placement so long as the tire valve is actually the heaviest point of the rim
I say that as there have been more than one rim that I sat on my balance rig with the tire off only to discover the heaviest point of the rim wasn’t at the tire valve, in fact once the heavy point was 180 degrees opposite the tire valve location
Best,
Jake
Reddick Fla.
Liberalism: Ideas so good they have to be mandatory
Was that
WITH the valve stem installed??
Most rims are made so they are reasonably evenly weighted with the valve stem hole in place, then they
ADD the valve stem, making it the heaviest point by something close to the weight of a valve stem - international conventions call for that to end up the heaviest part of the naked rim in order to allow the easier matching & balancing of tires with the also internationally called for 'yellow dot on the lightest part of the tire'. By those same international conventions, the red dot on a tire denotes the tires high point in it's roundness, usually where the tapered join in the tread layer causes a bit of a bump, and if the rim isn't exactly round, it should be marked at its lowest spot (usually with a tiny drill spot or a sticker) so that the tire tech can match the red dot to the correct spot on the rim - but if the rim doesn't have such a mark, then the tech should align the red dot on the tire with the valve stem, even if the tire also has a yellow dot! :thumbup:
Still, most
good quality rims and tires these days are made very well & require little if any balancing - the manufacturers of both tend to work together in order to achieve a better overall product, resulting in less (if any) need for balancing or indexing on the rim to match high/low spots. This stuff is all governed by the same international conventions that decree manufacturers use basically the same sizing terminology & date/production marking syntax, and for
MOST reasonably good quality rims & tires, it is largely complied with - if it's not, those manufacturers tend to lose sales &/or be forced out of the market, so even tho there are some cheap & nasty rim & tire manufacturers out there, they generally don't last too long or they up their game & very soon comply with the international conventions.
If you got some (possibly dodgy??) rims that obviously
DON'T comply with those international conventions, then you should really consider tossing them, cos if they took such an obvious short-cut,
who knows what other short cuts they may have made!! :shocked: Not all that long ago here in Oz we got a batch of counterfeit 4WD rims, rims that for all intents & purposes
LOOKED like the quality brand they were copies of, but it didn't take long for people to realise that they were very difficult to balance regardless of where the tire tech aligned the dots... then the rim failures started happening, often at speed! The centres would part company with the rest, or the rim would split circumferentially, and all sorts of other fairly drastic things! No fatalities, but a fair few accidents & then the rims were traced & recalled, and that company no longer imports into Australia... but I believe it's still selling rims into other less advantaged parts of the world! :yikes:
) then you are very unlikely to find the tire actually needs balancing. :thumbup: 
hyea:
Sorry. 
