I've just had four nice new Michelin Energies fitted to the Xantia and unfortunately as I predicted based on past experience, getting the wheels balanced has been an unmitigated disaster.
The fitter, who shall remain nameless for the moment, who assured me were able to balance centreless rims (I specifically asked them to confirm this before going ahead) has totally failed to get the wheels balanced to a satisfactory or even usable level after three attempts.
I've now spent after work on Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning getting the wheels fitted and balanced, re-balanced, and re-balanced again a second time to no avail. The first time they struggled for an hour and a half to try to do it and the balance was way out front and rear.
The second time the balance was OK'ish at the front (at least compared to the first time) but way out at the rear so on the 3rd visit I asked them to only re-balance the rears. After this the rears felt fairly good but some vibration was still evident at the front so I asked them to re-do the fronts, now the front is far worse, in fact it's pretty much unusable between 70-90mph, and an embarrassment to any passenger that I might have in the car.
Either they or the machine are incapable of getting the balance right so I have to give up and try somewhere else. Yeah technically they are responsible for getting it right but at some point I have to cut my losses and accept that despite their best intentions they simply cannot do it.
We have a 3 month old baby to look after and I have already spent 3 1/2 hours of my time (mostly finishing work early) sitting in their waiting room, and have done close to 100 miles of wasted driving testing the balance on the motorway between each attempt, (it's quite a few miles to get to the nearest 70mph area to actually check it) as well as spending a couple of hours of my own time swapping tyres around then going for test drives trying to figure out which wheels are out of balance.
In short I'm fed up and frustrated and just want this sorted. So does anyone know a garage in the Glasgow/Lanarkshire area that can genuinely balance centreless rims found on some models of Xantia and get it right first time ?
I'm not looking for 3rd hand recommendations from something like black circles, but from first hand experience of having had tyres balanced there.
Last time I tried to find someone to balance the wheels on my old V6 about 3 years ago I phoned 12 local garages/tyre shops that all claimed to be able to do centreless according to their black circles listing only to be told either over the phone that they can't do it, or be told that they can do it, (by the office lackie) only to arrive to have the work done and then be told that actually they can't do it without so much as a sorry for wasting my time after telling me they could. So black circles listings and similar are basically useless for this.
As you can probably tell I'm extremely fed up and disgusted after the amount of mucking around that I've had over the last few days especially when I have an MOT to get done in a couple of weeks. It beggars belief that every single time I've tried to have centreless Xantia rims balanced over the years by "professionals" it has been a disaster where they simply cannot get it right.
Before anyone suggests a visit to David's, I've already been in touch with him and unfortunately his wheel balancer is buried behind a mountain of other equipment at the moment so he isn't able to help either, which is a shame as when he has done it in the past it has been spot on.
Any suggestions, other than avoid motorways ?
