Can you teach me more about lug bolts & related tire tools?

I agree that a headlamp has advantages, as does a magnetic lamp, where one of each might be perfect redundancy for a nighttime emergency at the side of the road.

What's odd about the troll James Wilkinson Sword is that he doesn't seem to understand the most basic and one of the simplest of human endeavors, which is that there is pleasure in doing things yourself, whether that be baking your own bread, whipping up your own mayonaise, growing your own tomatoes, fixing your own car, shoeing your own horse, helping an old lady across the street, learning something new, etc.

To him, it's only about his "ten quid".

Pot, kettle, black.

Compared to what's in my pocket at the moment...

I mount the knobbies on the DR-650 myself but don't bother with the balance except for lining the dot up if there is one. With DOT knobbies it is sort of hard to tell if it's balanced or not. The last time around I went with Kendas and getting the bead to seat on the front was an adventure. I never had a problem with Dunlop 606's.

I take the ones with tubeless tires to a shop. After watching an guy trying to get the bead to seat on a Bridgestone as the sun sank into the west I was skeptical of my abilities. He had a high flow air system, the tourniquet, and so forth but it was a struggle. I might take a shot at it in the spring. I've got a slow leak around the bead on the Harley that needs to be cleaned up so it won't be a complete demount.

Truck tires are just bigger :) I watched a guy in Canada fix one in place. He had me drive the inside dual up on blocks to get clearance, spudded it off, patched it, and put it back on. I think he'd done it that way once or twice.

My first DIY attempt was with a '51 Chevy. iirc, the owners manual had an illustration of breaking the bead by putting the bumper jack on it. All I managed to do was jack the car up.

Sometimes I question my motivation, like last month when I was changing the oil in a cold drizzle. At least this year step 1 of putting the studs on did not involve boiling water and salt to release the bottom tire which was frozen to the ground. A little dunnage is a good thing.

I'm driving on a plugged tire right now. Last Saturday I was 600 miles from home and the only shop nearby was a truck shop. He plugged it but did not have the proper equipment to play with my wheels. I put about

The drywall screw removed it still usable too!

Jesus. That's battle gear for heaven's sake!

This is what I consider to be a typical pocket knife.

The Harbor Freight tire mounting tool has an accessory for mounting motorcycle tires, but the HF static bubble balancer does not. AFAIK, most people statically balance motorcycle tires using a horizontal freely spinning bar, do they not?

I did bike tires in the 80s, before they were typically as fat as they are now (especially the rears), where it wasn't hard in the olden days, with a good tire iron and three hands.

I find that car tires are easiest on the import economy vehicles, and almost as easy on the European sport vehicles, but the sidewall and larger profile makes SUVs harder (at least the ones I've done), where I just ass-u-me that truck tires would be even worse.

I've seen every redneck method of breaking a bead that YouTube can fester, where the purpose-built HF bead breaker is the tool of choice for the home owner.

The bead breaker attachment that comes standard with the HF tire mounting tool works fine on the import economy vehicles, and even works on the European sports cars, but it fails miserably (it bends out of shape) on the SUV tires I've tried.

I agree with you that reasonable men have successfully plugged a tire from the outside after pulling out the offending nail or screw, but we can't argue too hard since the logic of the inside path is that it supposedly stands the test of time and the elements better.

Still, none of us are complaining that the rope plugs don't work, so it's surprising that no professionals will dare to use the method we all swear by.

It's one of the enigmas of DIY home and auto repair.

I wish I had saved a jar of all the embedded objects I've pulled out of tires over the years!

I enjoy changing the oil where I've used those topside extractors, but I prefer lying under car just marveling at the engineering that went into building the thing as the hot oil drains completely out into a wash basin.

To the comment of the one oddball guy who actually thinks it's all about his "ten quid", I have rarely needed a mechanic, where each of my vehicles are all well over a decade old, so I have no idea what I'm actually "saving" by doing my own tire repairs, clutch, flushes, cooling system replacements, brakes, tire mounting and balancing, etc.

My days of living in snow country are long gone, where I remember having to freeze inside the car while the defroster laboriously attempted to clear the ice, and having to heat up the locks to defrost them after a freezing rain, and once, my aluminum door handle snapped right off my 280Z in the cold.

I'm glad I never will see cold weather ever again, except during visits to the snow.

When it's January and drizzling, you pull the drain screw and hesad inside for a cup of coffee.

The Toyota hasn't made ten years yet, but the rest of the fleet is at least 10. The elder members are the F150 I bought in '86 and the Harley I bought in '97. It probably was 20 years ago when I ran the pickup through an alignment shop after replacing some steering components just to make sure, but it was in spec. Other than that none of them has seen a mechanic other than me. When I was a kid my father told me if I intended to drive that way I did I'd better learn how to fix things. I did.

Can you say 'lawyer'? I've spent some time in southern AZ close to the border. It's refreshing to deal with Mexican mechanics. They still use a bit of ingenuity.

My winner is a screwdriver that embedded itself in the outside dual on a trailer. The handle was a little scuffed but it was still usable.

We won't go into bicycle tires. I hate goathead thorns and any place the damn thing grow.

So I'm told. I had to make a personal appearance at the SSI office a couple of weeks ago. The security guard said "You can bring in a small knife. That's a big knife.' so out to the car I went.

I've got one of those I found by the side of the road. I guess it's the Officer' model with the toothpick, tweezers, and other strange stuff. I never carried it. This is Montana; we subscribe to the Crocodile Dundee School of Knives.

Yes. I'll probably pick one up and see if it makes any difference the next time around. Knobbies give you plenty of practice. 5K on the rear is doing good.

I haven't used it yet but I picked one of these up:

BIG tools :) Breaking the beads with a sledge hammer, or rather something like a cross head splitting maul is common.

Back in the '60s Harbor Freight and Chinese stuff was well in the future. Real tools cost real money. The cellar had a door through a poured concrete wall that was sturdy. You could do strange stuff with a scissors jack. You could also launch stuff when you were trying to compress the coil springs on your Healey... I was literally a shade tree mechanic. There was a handy maple with a branch that was just right for pulling engines. Much ambition, little money, get 'er done.

I really don't to experience the number of punctures being talked about here. 1 in 20 years is quite enough.

With respect to repairing punctures, the relevant part of the conversation is HOW to properly repair them.

There is only one proper way, which is to remove the carcass off the wheel, simply because the only way to know if there's damage to the inside is to look.

If you've ever seen the handfuls of fluffy black shavings that indicate a tire was driven on while very low in pressure, you'll know what I'm talking about, since a tire can easily have the belts visible inside, will look perfectly fine from the outside.

Luckily it's easy to dismount, remount, and statically balance (and dynamically test) a tire yourself, where it takes about the same amount of time as it takes a tire shop to do, only you don't have to drive to the tire shop on the flat tire (or mount the spare), and you get the satisfaction both of doing it yourself, and knowing you did it right.

heh heh ..., I remember those red cellar doors, at an angle to the house, from ground level to about two feet, with the lock on the inside that was always making that scraping sound that chills your spine, and then those solid concrete steps down. Yup. I haven't seen them in years either.

I don't know when HF came into existence, but thank God they did, as, well, for about $150 or $200, you get all the tools you need for changing and statically balancing tires that you don't already have, which means they pay for themselves in just about 10 tire changes, which, for me, is only a year or two (what with 4 cars to maintain).

The one thing I WISH HF had was a smoke machine, as those bimmers sure do find funny places to leak air!

In the lack of any firm plans for the way forward after Brexit, just what do you expect?

We have had May promising Nissan they won't suffer financially after we leave. So taxpayer's money to subsidise car production? Seems only yesterday Boeing were objecting to what they thought was that.

Very worrying that not only do those countries apparently have human beings far more suited to pick fruit etc than the English, but also have better skills for car building too? Perhaps we should simply give up now...

You are joking! I've seen on many occasions how much effort goes into removing/replacing a tyre from/on the rim using the specialised tyre fitting equipment. There is also the 15/30 minutes for blowing up a completely flat tyre with one of those little 12V compressors that fit into the cigarette lighter socket.

I can just see all those inexperienced people breaking/chipping their alloy rims using breaker bars.

For the money I pay to get a puncture repaired (and dynamically balanced) by a tyre shop it's not worth the effort to even consider Do-it-Yourself. Without researching prices, I'll bet here in the UK the cost of obtaining one or two proper tyre repair patches would actually be close to the cost of using someone who does it for a living.

Henry Ford established over 100 years ago that you don't have to have much skill to assemble a car. To be competitive it just needs to be cheaper either by having cheaper labour cost and/or offsetting a lot of the spend on new factories and equipment with generous "regional grants" that will be given to deprived eastern EU countries (and/or to bale out many of the financial basket cases in southern Europe).

If you don't think car assembly jobs are not going to migrate ask someone from the USA what happened to Detroit.

Carry the former in the UK and you would probably be arrested if stopped or if you used it in public.