Don't worry about your wheel, it's most likely the tire.

The first set of star specs I had on my Advans had two wheels that didn't need any weights. This set has weights on all four.

 

From some research, the yellow dots on the tire should be lined up with the valve stem. Haven't checked, but I doubt they did this at the shop.

 

That's exactly what it is, basically they did a lazy version of balancing a tire. This happens more often (heavy spots) on cheaper tires, but expensive ones can do it too.

Is it balanced, yes. Is it the best way to do it, no.

 

Maybe if they got paid more they would all be "experienced tire techs..."

 

i have balanced my own wheels/tires and have never had to put many strips of weights on except for the offroad wheels

 

Probably not, my friend Travis is a Tech there(he didn't/doesn't work all this week, so it wasn't him), but he said that everyone that works there is really young, lazy, and doesn't know much of shit....He tells me stories all the time of how dumb those techs taht work there are, shit, even his BOSS is younger than him.(he's usuing it as a buffer job till he goes back to school in april). But he knows his shit, he's been a master tech for 8/9 years now, and has to fix the other employees mistakes all the time.

THIS.....they seriously get paid SHIT at that place

 

THIS. If we ever notice a large amounts of weight being used in a certain spot, we will break the tire down and spin it

they say it requires less weight/should balance easier

 

my family has been in the tire business for over 40 years. this is common, but it's also lazy. The tire should have been rotated on the wheel to determine if the issue could be resolved through better distribution of the wheel and tire. This is rarely done though as most mechanics are pretty lazy when it comes to tires. There is usually a better solution then throwing a ton of weight in one area.

 

I'm sure they didn't want to break the bead and reposition the tire after they chipped the first wheel. They brought me back to show me, and I wasn't happy. So I'm sure they just wanted the wheels gone(on top of being lazy too).

 

When you're looking for new treys, you'll often see some coloured dots on the Tyre sidewall, and bands of color in the tread. These are all here for a reason, but it's more for the Tyre fitter than for your benefit.
The dots on the sidewall typically denote unformity and weight. It's impossible to manufacture a Tyre which is perfectly balanced and perfectly manufactured in the belts. As a result, all treys have a point on the tread which is lighter than the rest of the Tyre - a thin spot if you like. It's fractional - you'd never notice it unless you used Tyre manufacturing garage equipment to find it, but its there. When the Tyre is manufactured, this point is found and a colored dot is put on the sidewall of the Tyre corresponding to the light spot. Typically this is a yellow dot (although some manufacturers use different colours just to confuse us) and is known as the weight mark. Typically the yellow dot should end up aligned to the valve stem on your wheel and Tyre combo. This is because you can help minimize the amount of weight needed to balance the Tyre and wheel combo by mounting the Tyre so that its light point is matched up with the wheel's heavy balance point. Every wheel has a valve stem which cannot be moved so that is considered to be the heavy balance point for the wheel. (Trivia side note : wheels also have light and heavy spots. Typically the heaviest spot on the wheel is found during manufacture and the valve stem is then located diametrically opposite that point to help balance the wheel out).
As well as not being able to manufacture perfectly weighted tyres, it's also nearly impossible to make a tyre which is perfectly circular. By perfectly circular, I mean down to some nauseating number of decimal places. Again, you'd be hard pushed to actually be able to tell that a tyre wasn't round without specialist equipment. Every tyre has a high and a low spot, the difference of which is called radial runout. Using sophisticated computer analysis, tyre manufacturers spin each tyre and look for the 'wobble' in the tyre at certain RPMs. It's all about harmonic frequency (you know - the frequency at which something vibrates, like the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse). Where the first harmonic curve from the tyre wobble hits its high point, that's where the tyre's high spot is. Manufacturers typically mark this point with a red dot on the tyre sidewall, although again, some tyres have no marks, and others use different colours. This is called the uniformity mark. Correspondingly, most wheel rims are also not 100% circular, and will have a notch or a dimple stamped into the wheel rim somewhere indicating their low point. It makes sense then, that the high point of the tyre should be matched with the low point of the wheel rim to balance out the radial runout.

Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_th...#ixzz1EXeXviI0