Painted dot on tire

[Guest]

remind me is it the heaviest or lightest spot on the tire?

[Agemax]

should line up with the tyre valve i think. thats what i have always been told anyway.

[slayer61]

Could just be an "old wives tale", but I've heard it too... dot aligned with the valve stem.

[bwringer]

The dot is the lightest spot on the tire, and should be lined up with the heavy spot on the wheel.

On wheels with tubes, this will always be the valve stem. On most tubeless wheels, this will also be the valve stem.

However, some tubeless wheels have a different heavy spot -- this is far more common on older bikes such as ours.

Modern wheels seem to be made a bit more precisely, so on newer bikes you can almost always count on using the valve stem as the wheel's heavy spot.

The proper thing to do with Ye Aulde GS, then, is to put the clean bare wheel with valve stem installed on the balancer and find the true heavy spot. If it's the valve stem, great. If not, mark the true heavy spot and use that as your reference when installing the tire.

On my GS, for example, the true heavy spot on the rear wheel is one spoke clockwise from the valve stem.


Just to complicate things, some high-quality modern tires (such as Avon RoadRiders) are manufactured with perfect balance, so there's no dot. Just mount 'em up and balance -- and if you install "factory balanced" tires the next time around, you'll won't need to balance again.