There are really two routes you can go here. You can take your tires to your nearest tire shop and pay 10-20 dollars for each peice of fresh meat you need put on a rim, or you can be like me and waste over 8 hours of your life devising your own tire bead breaking system. THIS IS A PROVEN SYSTEM. Here’s how. You will need-
- Dish Soap (I’ve only used Dawn, but I can assume any would work)
- 2-3 Tire Irons (I prefer large flat-blade screwdrivers bench-ground to a blunt end and bent with a torch. This prevents you from opening your wallet.)
- Your own tire bead breaker setup. I’ll go into this in a future post.
- Tie down straps (crank type are best)
First, you need to get your bead breaker all set up. I’ll have pictures in a day or so. There are a couple methods, including using a car and a peice of 2×6, which I haven’t gotten to work, though watching the wood explode under my truck tire was pretty funny. I knuckled down and welded up my own meaty tire bead breaker from scratch, and it works decently. The pending pics will definitely clarify things. Once you get the tire de-seated,the hard part is over.
Then, cup your hand (coated in dish soap) and thoroughly coat a lip of the tire with soap. Now, work a part of the tire lip over the edge of the rim with an iron. (yea, this is easy.) Now, don’t ever let that part of the lip slip from your grip. Now, work from your starting point, popping the lip of the tire over to your side of the rim.
Once you get past halfway, the tire will pretty much take itself off. At 2/3s of the way, it will definitely pop off, and you won’t be stopping it. You will now have one side of the tire free, and the other lip between the two edges of the rim. Now, drop the tire irons and start yanking. If this lip is soaped enough, you can oval the tire over the rim’s edge, or taco the tire to pop the remaining rim edge out of the inside of the tire. It’s off! clean the rim WELL, and soap ONE lip of your new tire.
Now, press one side of the rim through the soaped lip of the tire at an angle. You shouldn’t need tools for this. Once that’s done, flip the tire over to the side where the lip of the tire has not yet been pushed inside the edge of the rim. Now, find a good strudy door with a handle you feel comfortable exerting ungodly amounts of force on, and grab hold.
Straddle the rim, with your feet on the sidewall of the tire. Push really really hard with the assistance of the door handle, and work the lip of the tire over the rim. I’m a semi-scrawny 130 lbs., and I can do this. So there’s a fair chance you could too. Once the tire is on, use a compressor, or your local gas station to seat the tire. Some tires (namely ITP Holeshots) require lots of scary pressure to pop their “rim protector” over the edge of the rim.
Usually the side of the tire says the max seating pressure. If the tire (particularly a used tire) is being troublesome, throw a tie down around the tire and crank on it to help push the sidewalls out so the beads will take hold while you’re applying pressure.
