A few months ago my friend had some issues with her motorcycle. She said the handlebars were shaking. We tried a few things to rectify the issue:
Filling the tires to the correct PSI
Checking the steering head bearings
Re-aligning the forks and front axle
Things had gotten progressively better, but the issue was still there. I remembered she had gotten a new tire a few weeks prior so I thought maybe it wasn't balanced properly, or more likely the weights had fallen off. I strapped my wheel balancer to the back of my motorcycle and went over. It's a pretty simple device. It has a fork with 4 wheels on the top holding an axle. You place your unbalanced tire on the axle and spin it around. Eventually it will stop moving and the heaviest part of the tire will be on the bottom. You attach weights on the opposite side to counteract this. The whole system is very simple and works using gravity.
Unfortunately, on the ride over I lost one of the 4 wheels that support the axle, it must've rattled lose on the freeway. Without the wheel I was unable to do much for her then so I went home and got to fixing my stand.I started with the basics, seeing if I could find any spare parts online, and of course, there were none. Then I thought, it can't be too hard to fab something up myself. So I had a few things to do to get this up and running again:
Replace the screws (with lock-tite this time)
Replace the missing wheel
Replace the missing spacers
Initially, I thought I could 3D print a new wheel, but then I wasn't sure I could make anything smooth enough to get the job done. Looking at the wheel I noticed it was simply a metal circle with a ball bearing pressed into it, so I eventually decided to replace the large metal wheels with only ball bearings. They were smaller so it meant I would have to move the holes closer together on the stand. I measured the ball bearings and started drilling and taping the holes.
So that was one task done. I headed over to home depot to get a few bolts and a spacer. I hadn't measured the spacer before hand so I decided the best thing I could do was purchase a pack of washers and adjust the number to match the desired thickness.
I reassembled the balancer using lock-tite to hold the wheels in place, and just like that it was done! I grabbed an old tire I had sitting around to test out my repair job. As you can see in the video it worked great!
The next day I packed everything up again and went over to my friends house. We balanced her tire and I'm glad to say after 2 weeks of trying various methods to quell the vibrations balancing the tire ultimately fixed it; her bike rode smoothly again. I was happy to repair my balancer rather than having to buy a new one simply for lack of one small part.
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