Inline engines are not balanced with Bob weights added to the rod journals like a V engine is. If he argues that they should be, he is simply wrong in his analogy and does not understand the difference between the balancing of a V engine versus an inline.
The rods, pistons, wrist pins , rings and bearings are balanced separately, and their mass cancels or offsets the others. On a four cylinder, you have the components 90 degrees apart to do this like a seesaw. On a 6 cylinder, it takes a set of 3 of these components to offset and create balancing. Similar to a ceiling fan with an odd number of blades.
If you remove counterweights or knife edge them, like we did all our race crankshafts. Then you will have to rebalance the crankshaft to correct the state of neutral balance because you will have spots where more metal was removed than in other spots to maintain the factory balance. We also welded up the factory drilled balance holes in the counterweights to remove unwanted windage issues that they create.
