I have a bunch of track tyres and wheels, and I'm fed up with paying 80 quid to have tyres changed at the local tyre center, so I started looking into ways of changing them myself.
There's a load of manual tyre machines etc, but I'm worried that they might not work with low profile tyres (225/45r17 specifically). The tyre machines say up to 16" only, which I think has to do with breaking the bead.
Anyway, I built a test "proof of concept" machine out of wood:
The tyre goes here:
Hard to tell, but the bead is broken here:
Some tools...
... and some sweat
Now that the proof of concept is built, I'm going to build one out of metal. I might still use a wooden lever, though, as that needs to be really quite long, as breaking the bead is hard work on 17" tyres.
I haven't actually tried mounting a tyre yet, but at least now I can get them off, and I'm sure it can't be that bad to get them back on again
There's a load of manual tyre machines etc, but I'm worried that they might not work with low profile tyres (225/45r17 specifically). The tyre machines say up to 16" only, which I think has to do with breaking the bead.
Anyway, I built a test "proof of concept" machine out of wood:
The tyre goes here:
Hard to tell, but the bead is broken here:
Some tools...
... and some sweat
Now that the proof of concept is built, I'm going to build one out of metal. I might still use a wooden lever, though, as that needs to be really quite long, as breaking the bead is hard work on 17" tyres.
I haven't actually tried mounting a tyre yet, but at least now I can get them off, and I'm sure it can't be that bad to get them back on again