Personal site · Made in the Netherlands
Liam
Dutch guy. Owns an Audi. Spends a frankly concerning amount of his free time making round things rounder. This is his whole personality, and he is at peace with that.
Who is this guy
Hi, I am Liam. I live in the Netherlands, where the land is flat, the weather is a personal insult, and the bike lanes are smoother than most motorways. None of that matters, because I have a car, and the car has four wheels, and the wheels must be balanced.
People have hobbies like padel or sourdough. I have a 2.0 TFSI and a set of wheel weights. When friends ask what I did this weekend, I say “a little of this, a little of that” and what I mean is I rotated four tyres and felt genuine joy.
I am told this is not normal. I am told this by people whose steering wheels shudder at 110 km/h. I do not take their feedback.
Hobbies (there are four; they overlap)
Working on the Audi
Oil, filters, brake fluid, that one rattle that only happens in third gear when it is raining. I have named most of the bolts. The garage smells like victory and slightly like coolant.
Driving the Audi
Sunday morning, empty B-road, a thermos of coffee that will absolutely spill. The point is not speed. The point is that everything is silent except a perfectly, beautifully balanced set of wheels.
Balancing the wheels
The main event. Other men go to therapy. I clamp a 10 gram weight at exactly the right spot and watch a vibration die. It is the single most satisfying thing a human can do indoors.
Explaining wheel balancing
Unprompted. At dinner. To people who did not ask. My record is 40 minutes before someone changed the subject to literally anything else.
The wheel thing, explained
A wheel that is even a few grams off will wobble as it spins. At speed, that wobble becomes a vibration you feel in the seat, the wheel, your soul. The fix is to add tiny counterweights until the spin is true. Most people pay a shop for this once and forget it exists. I think about it on the way to sleep.
Balance a wheel yourself
Here is the closest you will get to my Saturday without leaving the couch. The wheel spins with a heavy spot (the red dot). Clamp a counterweight when it reaches the top. Good timing kills the wobble. Bad timing makes it worse, and yes, you can absolutely make it worse.
Life in the lowlands
My garage floods roughly twice a year. The wheels remain balanced.
I have done a full tyre rotation in the rain. In the Netherlands this is called Tuesday.
There are more bikes than people here. None of them are balanced to my standard.
Yes, I have considered balancing the bike wheels too. We do not talk about it.
That is the whole site. A guy, a car, four very round wheels, and the quiet confidence of a man who has never once felt his steering wheel shake.