ATV Tires and Balancing Beads

When should you use balancing beads on ATV tires? And if you have high quality tires and rims on your four-wheeler, do you even need balancing beads at all?

Partzilla’s ATV expert John Talley livestreams Q&A sessions on our YouTube channel every Friday at 3pm Eastern. In this session, John was asked for his thoughts on using balancing beads for ATV tires.

ATV tires

Balancing Beads and ATV Tires Q&A

What are your thoughts on using balancing beads and ATV tires?

John Talley: Well, it’s a common practice, but it really comes down to how you’re going to use your ATV and/or side-by-side. I mean, if you spend most of your time in between crawling around on 30-40 miles an hour most of the day, you’re really not going to get much of an advantage out of these, especially if you’ve got some aggressive tires with the big paddle type, like you’d see in the sand. Although that would work for the sand, but in the mud you’re really not going to get that much of an advantage. The one good part is if you get a bunch of mud inside the rim, and it’s uneven, it’s going to help you to even that out once the speed increases. Now, if you’ve got a set of tires that are mainly for onroad or hard pack, and you’re going to spend most of your time at 40 miles an hour and up, then balancing beads may be the way to go. But I want to caution you not to use too much, and not too little. So definitely follow the recommendation for the tire size and rim that you’re trying to work with. The other thing is if you’ve got a high quality rim and tire, typically nothing is going to be perfectly balanced, that’s just not possible. But if both pieces are high quality, you’re probably not going to need the beads. Mount up the tires and then just drive it. And if you want to add the beads to it, go ahead. You don’t have to dismount the tire to do so. You can actually fill it through the valve stem, although it takes a long time to do that. Oh, one other thing. I’ve heard people say you don’t need those ceramic beads, you can just use air soft pellets, but no, don’t do that. I’ve heard horror stories about those clumping together.