Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Mounting Tires via DIY?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • #31
    tires as small as the aspire ones are pretty easy to change. I started changing my own motorcycle tires years ago because the shops around here wanted to bend you over really badly... like $30-70 per tire. Ridiculous!

    Over the years I've got some tire irons and stuff that make the job a lot easier. I use a high lift jack to break the beads, normally thats the easiest way. I work on lifted 4wd trucks and stuff a lot too, and those aren't even worth balancing. I mounted a set of 44's by hand once, on alloy wheels. I even seated some beads using ether, though that didn't work once and I lost some of my eyebrows which lead me to buy a cheetah bead seater, which is nice... not just for seating beads (it will do a 38" tire on a rusty wheel with 140 psi in it) but also for shooting golf balls (replace the pinch pipe with straight pipe and it will shoot one a couple hundred yards).

    Generally, the smaller the tire the easier it is to get leverage... with a small enough tire I can hold one spoon down with my knee while I work another one and it makes it fast and less effort. My trailer has 12" tires on steel wheels and I can do them in a couple minutes, so it would probably be similar with the festiva tires.

    its very hard to do without scratching the rims if they are aluminum. I have some rubber guards that are suppose to help but they tend just to get in the way. realistically most of the time on used rims the lip gets scratched and etc just from normal use and even from machine mounting so I don't sweat it much... the 44's I mounted were on a brand new $1200 set of mickey thompson 20x10's and I managed to get them on without scratching them up just by being very careful with tool positioning. Getting them off without scratching the outside lip is a little more challenging.

    Oh, and for what its worth I have a set of 35" tall x 16.5" wide mud tires for my 78 F150 and I cannot get them on myself. I can dismount them and I can get one sidewall one, but due to the tire being nearly a foot and a half wide its just too hard to get that second sidewall on. fortunately the local place only charges me $5 to mount them when I get them like that cause he says I "did half the job for him." He is a good guy... always gives me very fair prices.

    as far as balancing the motorcycle tires I've done haven't had any issues, I leave the weigh on there when I take off the old tire because usually it just balances out the valvestem and sport bike tires are built to such demanding specs that they are usually very close to true (only so much balancing helps when you top out at 180 mph). And the rest have been trailer and truck tires, which I don't balance and haven't had any issues, though none of them are in a passenger vehicle that I ride in down the highway at 70mph.
    Last edited by hasteranger; 01-22-2013, 10:21 PM.

    Comment

    Working...
    X