DIY tire mounting and balancing?

Yes. For most tires, you can mount and dismount the tire with a simple set of tire irons. Some are easier than others, I have to say.

Once you get the tire on the rim, seating the bead can sometimes be a problem, but you can also work that out with some fairly simple devices. There is one you put around the circumferance of the tire and air up to pull the bead into contact with the rim, and there are mechanical versions which do much the same thing.

There is a static balancing rig which is fairly inexpensive and does a fair job of balancing. It will not do the same job as the very expensive Hunter machines or similar, but the results are often quite good.

Yes. I had to do that last year in the hot rain using large screwdrivers and a simple bubble balance after someone (not me) slid into a curb and ripped up the tire.

Well, I just cut the old tire off the rim with a lot of saw blades (those steel belts eat up blades rather quickly), brought the wheel to a dealer, and had a new tire installed. The installation itself was $20.

So unless you plan on doing a _lot_ of this kind of thing, it doesn't make much sense to DIY when the dealership has all the right equipment and labor for using it is only $20.

Nick

That is pretty much true.. Any tire shop, good service station, etc should have the equipment to mount and demount tires. Balancing is a little different.

But you dont have to go to a dealership.

Sometimes you are out in the boonies and you may have a reason to have to mount and demount tires by hand. Fine.

In a few cases, I have seen wheels that could be damaged by some redneck with a tire machine. Some have been hand demounts only.

But in general Nick is right.

When I was young and poor, my friend's dad showed me how to do it.

It's just like a bike tire, but he had some leaf springs that had been turned into giant prybars for this. Use a bumper jack on your pickup as a bead breaker, then pry the tire off a bit at a time. To install, use a come-along or ratchet strap to compress the center of the tire and inflate. Watch your fingers when the bead finally seats.

It took us about an hour per tire to do it by hand and that didn't include any balancing. I've since concluded that the $10 to mount and balance ain't so bad.

Places like harbor freight sell cheap tire mounting machines, but I'm sure it's still a fair amount of manual labor, and that still doesn't include any balancing.

Ray

I would imagine that the type/size of tire can change the difficulty considerably.

I used to do this a lot, but that was back when tires were bias-ply and considerably taller sidewalls (H78/14 and L78/15, etc.) I *do* recall that radial tires were more of a bitch to get on/off the rim, but whose beads were just as easily broken.

I can't imagine trying a 245/50R16 tire by hand, let alone a

--Ken

snipped-for-privacy@transam.sbcglobal.net (dye) wrote in news:g9otaj$a3p$ snipped-for-privacy@transam.sbcglobal.net:

the bigger the rim the easyer they are. It may take me 10 min. to do the ave tire with irons. KB

LOL. I should have added they were like 205/75-14's or something on my Volare. If you can afford $300 rubber you can afford to pay $15 to get them mounted on a machine that won't scratch the hell out of the rims. :)

Ray

The machine is often less the problem than the drooling redneck operating it.

I meant a machine compared to trying to use tire irons to dismount the tire. No way I'd be doing that on fancy rims. :)

I dont owe anything any more that is so finicky that I would have to worry about it ;>)

I recently picked up a nail in the Avalon, and decided to pull the wheel and deliver it to the tire shop to have it fixed. While there, I asked the "goober" if they rotated tires, and if they used a torque wrench to put them back in place.. "Naw, we just use that air wrench" was the reply. I guess he can fix a puncture, but he damn sure wont be rotating any of my tires.