Don Terrill’s Speed-Talk

Doing some research for a friend and figure this forum could be good for some independant advice/recomendations.

Looking at buying a crankshaft balancer. can people tell me what they use, good and bad points about the unit, what they would and would not recommend and why.

Most work will be small block stuff, chev, ford cleveland and windsor, Aussie holden. Street/strip motors to around 7500 rpm if that makes any differences.

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From my experience: I have used the older Hines and the newer Computerized Hines, also the Sunnen DCB 750 and DCB 2000. I really like the DCB 2000 and the Newer Hines, but Sunnen doesn't have a really solid concrete slab like the Hines. I hear Schenck balancers are very good and have the big concrete slab like I am talking about.

We have a old Stewart/Warner balancer it works good but its a lot of work balancing on that one going back and forth to the Bridge port all the time.

And 3 years ago we bought a Hines Eliminator at the PRI show with the mill table, Calibrating arbor and the fixture for drilling the counter weights for mallory and I really enjoy using this machine over the the Stewart/Warner and seems to be very accurate

We already have the bob weights and the flywheel mandrell from the S/W machine

Here is a pic

I have a Winona Van Norman balancer (XL2000) which I bought new in 1988. So far I've had no issues except with the timer board, the R19 component burned out twice. Both times it was taken care of rapidly and at no cost even though the warranty period was over.

I didn't buy the bobweights from Winona, I don't like the lead shot deal. My bobweights came from Carl Moss @ Equa-Poise balancing... they are a work of art for about the same money.

I didn't buy their scale either, I purchased a Centarius (German made) IMHO, it's about twice the scale at 1/2 the money of the Toledo.

PS I forgot to mention the good points of the Winona Van Norman balancer.

It is fast, strokers can usually be brought within 20 grams with just a couple of spins. Mine has the air float/lock table with a Swiss made 8 speed gear drive drill press. Corrections can be made right on the machine.

It is accurate the scales goes down to 000.0 grams and you can get all zeros. When the balancer was new I set aside a Ford 2300 crank to use to check calibration. In the last 17 years it hasn't changed 1/2 gram.

It is fairly repeatable, you can take the whole set up apart (including bobweights) and reasssemble and the crank will spin up usually within a couple of grams.

Look at the CWT balancer.
I really like the effort they put into addressing heavy metal calculations.
You can fully "forcast" the number and location of tungsten plugs required.


They also built me a 10' long frame to handle longer work like drivelines.
Just a little nicer than setting two frames side by side.

Randy Neal has a good working knowledge of his machine and can handle most diagnostic issues over the phone. This was an important consideration for me.

CWT 1-800-449-1849

My Buddy owns a balncing shop in Fla. he swears by his hines with the mill table and drill press on rails. The only time in 10 years he had a problem it was fixed in a day.

I used the new Hines and love them, makes short work out of crank balancing, the only other balancer I ever used was a Pro-Bal, didn't care for that one.