Old School ON THE CAR Wheel Balancer! 

Seppo, it’s been 60 years+, but I used a machine similar to that.. so here goes: You need a good white mark (we used chalk) on the side of the tyre; The magnet is fixed under the lower wishbone, close to the wheel, to pick up vibration/oscillation from an out-of-balance wheel. Obviously it plugs in to whatever box has the correct connector, so the device (your second box on your machine?) can pick up the amplitude of vibration and ‘estimate’ the amount of imbalance, and thus the correct weight to apply to the wheel. Somewhere there should be a strobe-light to show the position of the balance mark which will then allow you to identify the heavy and light points of the wheel (you have that, just watched the whole video!) Take care, I’ve seen a badly out-of-balance wheel come close to throwing the car off the jack / jack-stands. Once had a wheel where a tyre-fitter had left a pair of pliers inside the tyre! (Tubed tyres in those days). PS, (edit) ‘static and dynamic’ don’t refer to whether the wheel is still or moving, rather ‘static’ means where on the diameter the balance weight needs to be, and “dynamic” relates to where it needs to be in relation to the width of the wheel - ie, how much is needed on the outside rim against how much is needed on the inside rim to balance the width of the wheel (hope that makes sense). Hope that helps. Les in UK 🇬🇧

The strobe light is very likely suffering with a dead capacitor, as I see a rather large one attached to the PCB there, and is not building up enough charge (if any) needed for firing the lamp, it's the usual case with a lot of older tech, the capacitors just give up as they age and dry out inside, so could be just a simple case of re-capping the board with new capacitors... :)

Today I just finished a spring internship as a manufacturing engineer with hunter engineering. I worked on our balancer a lot and seeing this is very cool!

As an apprentice I worked with a similar machine, though the pickup was different, if remember correct there was a pushbutton for the strobe light, you would make chalk mark across the tire and when you hit the strobe light you saw the chalk mark, and the position would mark where you put your weight,if the strobe light moved forward or backward, it meant more or less weight, which fails me today 63 years later, remember cars at that time did not go as fast as today and these were not considered to be top off line even back then!!!!

I have a nice timing light with a dead strobe too. You can actually see the faintest of flashes occasionally if you cup it to your eye so I know the rest is working. I keep meaning to take it apart and replace some capacitors. As others have said, that is the place I would start. Especially easy on that nice big circuit board. Just make sure it's well powered down and drain the old caps before getting in there with your fingers!

My first Saturday job when I was 15yr old was at a tyre fitters. As my father owned garages and I was already mechanically and tyre fitting savvy. So at 15yr old I was fitting split rim commercial truck tyres on my own ... I do not imagine _'Elf & Safe Knee'_ would not allow it these days 😁 The place had a lot of farmers as customers and they are as tight as a duck's butt. So they used to buy the cheapest, nastiest remould car tyres for their cars and light vans. With the tyre balancer we had there, you took the wheel off and sat it on a spigot atop the machine .... then you supposedly balanced it all via a 'bubble' in the centre of the spigot. As the 'boy' I regularly got this onerous job. I swear most of the time it would've been cheaper to give them the tyre, then charge them for the lead to balance it! Many of the remoulds needed more lead attatched to the wheel than there was room on the rim to put it! 😂 Happy days and a lot of laughing.

When I was an apprentice I used a similar old on car balancer, but it only could do static balancing. You jacked up only the wheel to be balanced, place an axle stand under control arm and placed magnet close to the ball joint. You then spun up the wheel in the direction that it would normally travel then note at what position the valve on the rim was as it could be seen due to the flashing strobe and also read the required weight off the meter. Next you would slow down and stop the wheel. You then would turn wheel by hand until the valve is at the same position it was when the machine was running and flashing. Next step was to hammer on a weight the amount you noted on the meter at the 12 o'clock position. Then spin the wheel again to recheck, but this time you took note of where the wheel weight could be seen.If the position of the weight was between 8 and 10 o'clock you would shift the weight a bit clockwise, if the weight was between 2 and 4 o'clock you would shift the weight a bit anticlockwise. If the weight was noted between 11 and 1 o'clock it was considered to be too light and if it the weight was noted between 7 and 5 o'clock it was considered to be too heavy. Once a wheel was well balanced the strobe lamp would flash slowly and the needle on the meter would remain still at zero. I did on the rare occasion manage to balance some wheels so well that the strobe would only flash a few times and then remain off the whole time the wheel took to slow down to a stop, but never happened on the driven axles due to the lash in the gears.

dave northumberland england we had a similar one in my first garage as an apprentice magnet went under wishbone then chalk mark each time the wheel moved out of balance it moves the magnet and rod which generates a small current this is then amplified and fires the strobe showing the position of the chalk mark from memory th weight was placed opposite the chalk mark but im not sure also change all capacitors and any transistors resistors will be ok hope this helps

As far as I remember, you have a strobo (xenon) lamp, a sensor in a jack stand, a "flywheel" (the metal wheel that will touch the tire tread) and the lever to make the flywheel touch the tire. The car should be with all four wheels on the floor, then you jack up the car and place the jack stand close to the ball joint. Usually the motor will turn on once you pull the lever. Once the tire reaches the maximum speed, you release the lever and press the strobo button, that will flash according to the jack stand sensor, showing where you should place the weight. It's a trial-and-error process, like riding a bicycle. EDIT: the system you have is slightly different from the system we had in 1980's in Brazil -- Hofmann on car wheel balancers (I don't remember the models, though).

There. Have been some good comments on the use of this machine, i remember seeing a similar device when i was a child in the 1960s. The detector must be positioned to track the vertical vibration of the wheel. The bulb could be either a neon (generally used in the 1930s to 1950s, or a xenon bulb from the 1960s or later. A neon bulb operates with a pulse of about 100 Volts. A xenon bulb is much brighter but needs a power source of about 400 Volts and a trigger pulse of 1000 Volts or more. The two types of bulb are not interchangable. Either bulb type will read as open circuit until the necessary high voltage is applied. A xenon bulb will have about 400V applied to the 2 wires and a third trigger wire which is wrapped around or touching the glass near one end. I don't know how the triggering is done on your machine, but it could be as simple as a mechanical switch in the detector unit which applies a pulse when it is vibrated.

About 10 years ago I bought a wheel balancer from mid 80s, I was lucky to find a company here in sweden that used to work on exactly machines like mine, they sent me a box of spare parts and a manual for free❤really nice gesture, I think it was made in Denmark to, your machine is a lot older I think, but I hope you find someone that remember or have parts left some were back in a box👍👍

That's a cool bit of kit Seppo! That along with your other wheel balancer, all your friends will be asking for their wheels to be balanced too. I think many packs of beer could be earned!

Nice find, good video👍

That discharge lamp runs on very high voltage, several hundred volts, please keep your fingers away when testing it without covers on. It could in fact be lethal if you are unlucky !

Here i am watching you repair a tool from before i was born. And all i am doing is trying to fix a cheap 3d printer

HI the magnet may bee attached to the tie rod end if the machine does not work then is a good wheel bearing tester for noisy bearing's😊 the strobe light problem is probably the capacitor a full service is not a bad idea on the strobe light . hope you get it running ok

That's an interesting tool, I've never seen anything like it, hopefully you can get a manual or a viewer can shed some light as to how it works.

in the u k Hoffman used to sell a a similar machine that was about forty years ago

You can use a multimeter in diode or resistance mode to measure the lamps, if they read open line they are probably blown. You can also use the multimeter in voltage mode and hook it up to the terminals where the lamp i supposed to be connected in the box, then then turn it on and check if there is any voltage when it should be lighting up. Hope you can get this machinery working 👍

It must have been a good machine in the day Seppo because everything out of Copenhagen is “ Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen” 😂😂😂😂, I love that old joke 😂👌🏻

What a cool machine!

Hvis du skriver et opslag på bagsiden af bladet ''Ingeniøren'' kan det være du får nogle fif fra tidligere/erfarne mekanikere til at anvende den.

When you tested the “new lamp” the drive unit was not in operation. I’ve never seen a balancer of that type, but wouldn’t the drive wheel have to be spinning in order to send a synch to the hand held unit to time the lamp driver to flash? Just a thought. Interesting tool. 🍻👍

Syntes nu nok du virkede bekendt; Rudbæk hos HJH er mange år siden. Fed kanal du har fået op at køre 👍🏻 Ææælsker gammelt grej 😄

Those wheels are fantastic. Are they original?

Did you test the other pushbutton, it could be for the strobe????

Wow det er smart, jeg må eje sådan en skønhed en dag

for mange år siden hvor jeg stod i lære . Der havde vi en tæt på samme maskine , man kunne sidde på og afbalancere hjul på bilen . der skulle føleren placeres under bærekuglen eller så tæt på det var muligt . med hele bilens vægt der på før man startede

Are you sure that's just a lamp? It might be a combination of a lamp and a photo detector tube in a hole behind the reflector. Many of those machines require you to put a piece of reflective tape or a white mark on the the tire. Also, you could replace that magnet with a modern alnico horseshoe magnet.

the wheels on my VW bus come with a dust shield which isn't balanced and has really bad tollerance where the tire bolts have to go through.. so they imbalance the entire wheel on the car no matter how good the actual wheel is calibrated.. the machine in the video could actuall fix that. Or I just get rid of those damn flimsy things

I guess it won't flash before it picks up vibration.

vibrations on a a112? impossible :D :D :D :D

Ni e

It's a danish machine? Try feeding it "beer" and smörrebröd and it should behave. 🤣