El Cheapo Barstool Tire Balance Method

I know that they make great bullets. That's my other casting purpose. I have grown up around auto shops all my life. My Father was a career technician/service manager for Ford Dealerships, and I have worked in a couple of garages myself. Every one of those garages either disposed of their used lead through bullet/fishing sinker casters or scrap metal recylers clear back to the late 1970's. I have never laid witness to a garage dumping wheel weights illegally. I have, however seen numerous wrecking yards and private citizens improperly storing used batteries that contain much more lead. If the tire shops are illegally disposing of wheel weights, then the regulators need to go after them and not the private citizen. However, I still get lead wheel weights on my family car every time that the tires are balanced at Discount Tire. What gives?

Seriously, I'm not trying to bust your balls man. I'm just very passionate about individuals' rights, and it seems like they are being stripped away daily these days. I also happen to have a little inside knowledge of this business. My father and I have spent a cumulative 40 yrs in the auto service industry, and I have spent another 8 years as a machinist. I am quite familiar with the proper disposal of toxic metal waste.

Btw alot of tire shops recycle wheel weights internally. If they pull a 2oz off your wheel, then it goes in the bin. The next time they need a 2 oz. then they grab it and hammer it onto the next guys wheel. Problem solved. No toxic waste specialist needed.

testarossa wrote:

Boy howdy! Steel wheel weights have so many safety advantages over lead. In place of having a lead bullet when your wheel weight cuts loose, now we have an armor piercing bullet. I bet those things are twice the size of a lead weight. Sorry for my foul attitude. It's late. I'm going to bed now.

1 VOTE FOR LOVING YOUR ATTITUDE.

I AGREE!

Good grief Charlie Brown! I didn't know lead was a controlled substance. I have 500 lbs. of it in my basement that I used in the back of my old 2 wheel drive pickup for "bite" off road. Maybe the price will soar from 10 cents per pound to $1100 per ounce (the price of gold) on the black market. That would be $8,800,000. Yippeeee!! Ed

And let's not even get into how mercury filled compact fluorescents are going to save the world much like plastic bags were 15 years ago...but we digress.

Yea, this lead weight thing is bull s**t! I'm a mechanic and our shop recieved this last January!

My favorite part of that notice is the phrase about lead wheel weights disintegrating into lead dust. Are they actually even thinking about what they are saying here. Lead melts at 800 deg F how the hell does it disintegrate into dust on the side of the road. Ever try to cut a wheel weight in half?

These lawmakers are preying on their constituents complacency, and hoping that you won't read over the fine print here. Has any of these environmental experts ever stopped to think about the fact that there is a finite amount of lead in the world which will still be here disintegrating away even if we don't make the evil wheel weights. Its not going away, even if we don't use it for anything.

I have a way to make that lead more expensive. Since it is so evil, we should collect every single gram of it and launch it into space to remove it from our pristine environment. Last time I heard the price, NASA is spending about $6000 an ounce to put anything into orbit. There you go, uber-exensive lead. Ed will be happy, the environmentalists will be happy, NASA will be happy regularly launching there interstellar dump trucks, and the taxpayer, sadly, will have to foot the bill.

Only in California to do something this asinine. Now my great state of Florida will follow soon. I guess the old school method of leading your hot rod body panels will land big fines too. Try joining body panels with zinc and see how that works. What a joke. I will go stock up on lead wheel weights to last me my lifetime, this is getting ridiculous. I love clean water as much as the next guy but I would think fishing weights, and bullets will be the next targets from the Cali quacks in Sacramento.

Waterfowl hunters have been forbidden to use lead shot for several years now. The more popular substitutes have been steel, tungsten and bismuth.

Great balancing method! I had something similar in mind when I was trying to figure out how I would balance...

As for the whole lead thing - lead is a pretty big health concern and lead levels in waterways are increasing. I want clean water, but I agree stupid little legislative things that put a tiny band-aid in one area, while ignoring the real problem makes no sense. Decisions like this are obviously politically and monetarily based...

take an old steel swingarm and weld the pivot tube to a big ol piece of steel plate,instant wheel truing and balancing stand

Regarding lead; is it imported from Jupiter or some other planet or is it synthesized from other elements using alchemy? I ask, because if it is a naturally occurring element native to the planet Earth (as in Pb - Atomic Number 82 in the Periodic Table of Elements) it is already here, just not molded into wheel weights. Making wheel weights doesn't make more lead and not making wheel weights won't create less lead. All the lead on Earth is already here, there will never be more or less of it. Perhaps there is something about the shape of lead wheel weights that makes lead more toxic than it was before it was mined and cast into weights. Instead of outlawing a naturally occurring element, maybe the government should create a Department of Alchemy to develop a method of turning lead into gold. Ed

650ed wrote:

Regarding lead; is it imported from Jupiter or some other planet or is it synthesized from other elements using alchemy? I ask, because if it is a naturally occurring element native to the planet Earth (as in Pb - Atomic Number 82 in the Periodic Table of Elements) it is already here, just not molded into wheel weights. Making wheel weights doesn't make more lead and not making wheel weights won't create less lead. All the lead on Earth is already here, there will never be more or less of it.

True, but the same can be said of other incredibly toxic elements like cadmium, plutonium, uranium, mercury et al. The problem arises when people find a commercial use for one of them and go out and collect a bunch of it and then dispose of the leftovers into landfills where it goes into the groundwater.

Lead has a particularly bad rep because of all the people poisoned by lead paint. Lead poisoning is particulary evil because it builds up in the body and may only give subtle symptoms until you really have a load of it in you. In children it is known to cause brain damage and actually make the IQ lower which is never good......