Counteract Tire Balancing Beads for Off-Road Vehicles - 4 Tires

Video Transcript for Counteract Tire Balancing Beads Review

Hi everyone. Aiden here at Etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at the Counteract tire balancing beads. Now, right away it's important to note that these come in a variety of different kits and sizes. This four ounce bag here isn't gonna work with the same applications that this six ounce bag here does, and the one that we're specifically installing today is a kit of four of these six ounce bags that'll work with our tandem axle trailer. So the important thing to do is go to our website and look at the different kits available.

Whether you've got a heavy truck, a trailer, or an off-road vehicle, there's gonna be a kit for you. Each page is really well documented with different tire sizes that they're meant to work with and different applications. So find the right one and go from there. That way you're not putting too much or too little into whatever tire you have. Now, the question you might be asking yourself is why Why do you need tire balancing beads Well, to balance out your tires and give you a better ride quality.

On a utility trailer like this, it probably doesn't make that much sense because more likely than not, you don't care that much. If it's riding really badly, then sure, but if it's just a slight imbalance, it's probably not that big of a deal to you and most people are probably just gonna move on from it. But let's say you've got a car hauler or a race trailer, maybe a camper. In those cases where you've got maybe more precious cargo or something that you're gonna be camping out of and you want it to be riding smoothly, then yeah, you probably do wanna balance it out. And if you feel like your trailer's just riding rough because of an imbalance, then it can't hurt to try to fix it.

So the way these will work is by injecting the beads or putting them into the tire, and as the tire spins due to centrifugal force, it's going to spread those beads out and they'll naturally want to fall opposite of a heavy spot. So if your heavy spot on your tires over here as it spins and gets up to speed and those beads start to distribute, they're gonna naturally want to sit opposite of that. Now, from the factory, you're probably gonna have some markings on your wheels and tires that when they're put together, they'll try to put the heavy side of the wheel opposite of the heavy side of the tire, and that probably will get it most of the way there. But these beads could be a good option to just make up that difference and even things out the rest of the way because it's probably just not gonna be perfect from the factory. Pretty hard to see because these beads are so small, but they're made of a glass, so they're not going to clump together and Counteract states pretty strongly that these aren't going to damage the inside of your tire.

This style of balancing bead, that might be a concern for some people, but again, they state very strongly that these are not going to cause damage, and that does fill me with some confidence. And if you do have an issue, then you know that they're probably gonna take care of it. The other thing to know here is that they are TPMS sensor compatible. So if you do have internal TPMS sensors, then these can still work. Now, aside from picking out the right kit for your tire, you're probably wondering how they install. They are pretty straightforward and no matter which one you end up getting, they're all pretty much gonna be the same. So we'll walk you through the process of what we did on our trailer today so you can see how it's done. And that same process can apply to a different tire. Say it's a heavy truck or an off-road vehicle or another trailer like this. So follow along and we'll show you how we did it. Now, when it comes to getting the beads inside the tire, there's two ways you could do this. If you want to dismantle the wheel and tire, you could just toss the bag in, reassemble it, and pop it back on. The bag will over time disintegrate and the beads will disperse from there. But if you don't wanna go through that, you can also use the included injector bottle to feed them in through the valve stem, and that's the method we're gonna show you today. So I'll start by just opening up the bottle and feeding the beads in very carefully so I don't drop as many. There we go, I'll pop the cap back on. And I did already snip the tip off here and I went very little. I don't want a whole lot of room here. If I find that it's getting clogged, I can always snip off more, but for now, we'll just pop the tube on to the end of that nozzle pretty firmly so it doesn't fall off. Next we need to turn our attention to the wheel. Now I've got the trailer lifted up with a jack and a jack stand behind me, wheels are chocked, and I'm just lifting this one side. The reason for that is because I don't want the weight of the trailer down on the tire once we let the air out, because we are gonna need to remove the core on that valve stem. So take the included tool, the back end here has that core removal tool, and you're just gonna pop that onto the core and unthread it. (air hissing) Now we're gonna let the air release because as it's all pushing out, the beads can't go in, they're gonna be fighting against that air. So just give it a little bit of time. It really doesn't take that long. And that's the other part of the reason why we lifted it up is so we're not just pushing more air out than we need to and squishing the tire down. While I do let it sit here though, you'll notice that it came with, and in the kit, that is, it came with a new valve core. It's this one with the plastic cap on the end. It's basically designed to help the beads not hit it or cause any damage to it, or potentially clog the valve stem if we ever needed to let air out or back in. So whenever we reassemble this, the new core will be going back in and it'll reinstall the same way as we remove that old one. Now, the last step is to fill your tire. You wanna do this little bits at a time, so don't just try to dump the whole bottle in. It's not gonna work. What you wanna do and what I've found is easiest is to get the tube onto the valve stem. And if you can get it to make a seal, that's great. Ours is not fitting perfectly, so I'm just gonna hold it with some pressure. I'll tip the bottle and try to get some of those beads out. And you might be able to kind of tap the end here to try to get them to go through the valve stem. But you'll notice here we've got a bit of a clog and it's a pretty easy fix. So if you ever find that it's backing up, tip the bottle down and just squeeze it. It's gonna create a vacuum with some back pressure and suck the beads back down before you can continue feeding them in. So it's a combination of tipping, but also squeezing the bottle and just periodically tipping it back over if need be. So it's gonna be a little time consuming, but that's the process you're gonna go through until you've got the bag added. And with this kit coming with four bags for each of our four tires, we just do this same process for the remaining three tires after this one's done. And that last little bit might be a little bit hard to get in there, but tapping the bottle works pretty well and just keep squeezing it to apply that back pressure. But overall, it's not too bad, it just takes time. The opening on the valve stem there, even with that core removed, it's not large, so it's just gonna be something you have to be patient with and unfortunately repeat three more times. Once you're done though, that new core can go back into the tool and get threaded in. (background beeping) And we'll of course have to fill our tire back up with air. Once we do that though, the kit also does come with new valve stem caps. On our trailer we actually had one missing back here, so now we have one, but I'll take this off and fill it back up with air. And once all four are done, we can lower this down back to the ground. But once you've repeated that process for the remaining tires and the trailer's back down on the ground, that'll do it. So overall, a pretty simple process. Really, it's just time consuming. But if your tires are unbalanced and you're looking to get better performance out of them and have them be better balanced, then this will do the trick and it's pretty easy to do just at home on your own. But that'll do it for a look at and the installation of the Counteract tire balancing beads. Thanks for watching.