Tire balancing beads; do they work well? My experience on my Vespa GTS 300

When I bought my Vespa GTS 300 i.e. Super, it had already some road experience being a little under 7000 km / 4500 miles. From day one the front was not very stable which I first thought to be linked to the tires, but they were in good shape. When checking Vespa forums I noticed that more people owning Vespa GTS-es had there issues which was called speed wobble. I have done a lot of improvements in order to get it resolved, as you can read in this article on TourOn2Wheels: How I solved speed wobble on my Vespa GTS 300 i.e. Super.

When doing some regular maintenance on the Vespa, I noticed that the front wheel contained so called tire balancing beads. I have no clue how I could have overlooked this, as I had disassembled a few times the wheel and also during the static balancing I did not hear them rolling in the tire.

Tire balancing beads are like plastic/rubber balls which you can put into your (motorcycle-)tire via the air pressure valve when having the valve core removed. It will act like balancing weights in the tire when it is rotating on the vehicle/motorcycle. The centrifugal force when the wheel is turing will push this little “weight” balls to the outside of the wheel, and according to the manufacturers of these balancing beads they will settle at the lowerst weight part of the tire thus balancing it. One way or the other I always have been skeptical about it.

So having done a proper static balancing of my front wheel of the Vespa, I thought it would be better to remove the beads. There was really a very minimal amount in and nothing from what I could find on the net on how much would be normally put into a wheel in order to be “effective”. After having removed them, cleaned all, reinstalled the tire, and finally the wheel to the Vespa, it was time for a test drive. The result was that the front wheel and steering gained further in stability. With the little amount of beads in, the front wheel & steering would still be nervous but without the balancing beads it was rock stable.

So for me one is clear: balancing beads do not work well, and your are way better off doing a proper static balancing!