A few years back, I was trying to change a WD tire. My wife agreed to help. After struggling for a long time (and a very colorful vocabulary), one of my bars slipped and I missed hitting her in the head by inches. I decided it was time to take it to a tire shop.

The guy at the tire shop finished changing it in a few minutes and charged me $20.

 Some things are just better to leave to the pros!!!

Don't know if I would do it again by myself.

About the same year I mounted 2 new rears on a JD 60 that were fluid filled.

Been on there for 30 years. Had to fix the rims because of rust from the calcium.

8 hours per tire. Lot better shape then still kicked my butt. That death machine learned a whole new language from me in those 2 days and then I drove it 15 miles home.

I happily pay the guys at the local tire shop to do mine, although I have the tools to do it myself.  The guys at the tire shop are friends of mine and they have families to feed too!!

Tire work has never been "fun work" to me!

Gets tricky if you don't about it.

Done hundreds mounting U-Haul tires when I was a lot younger 

in a really crappy job I had. Only way to do it.

22.5 I think stacked 12 high. beads were about 2" apart mounted.

Starting fluid still gives me a headache smelling it.

It was me.  You will never know who you kill, until it's too late.  In the case of my Father's defense of his client (a major tire recapping organization), the victim was a young girl, who was walking along a sidewalk, holding her mother's hand.  After the truck tire exploded, it left her mother holding the little girl's hand, but the rest of the girl's body was painted into the wall of a grocery store.

Spraying flammables inside a tire is a lethal hazard, because it burns, and expands, until either you

1) run out of fuel

or

2) run out of oxygen.

In the case of the latter, that means there's still volatile fuel inside.  What's the next thing you do, once the bead is seated?

You put an air-hose on it, and pump it up.

That's adding oxygen.

And you put pressure on it.  That's compression.

What's left?  A source of ignition.  A little static electricity... a little heat.

BOOM.

Stupid people use flames to seat tires.

Use the Cheetah... that's what they're for.

People say that about diesel fuel and gasoline, too... pour it out on the ground and light it... pour black powder, smokeless powder, and trinitrotolulene out on the ground and light it... it burns.  These people have absolutely no understanding of the physics of burn cycle, but it would serve well to learn how burn process works.  It is particularly useful for those wishing to understand how performance of internal combustion engines actually works.

Pack a combustible, mixed with oxygen, it in a tight space, it explodes.  Why?  Because it is under pressure, AND the pressure RISES while it burns.  The initial pressure is low, and as it burns, the fact that it is contained, causes the pressure to increase dramatically.

 

Let's say you put a CUP of gasoline into a tractor tire, then seal up the tire, and put 15psi into that tire.  You have just placed 7500btu of chemical energy into a confined, pressure-tight vessel, yielding the equivalent of 6 sticks of dynamite.

Let's say that the moment the vapors ignite, the interior pressure is 15psi (one atmosphere above standard).  The heat generated at ignition causes the interior temperature to increase, which results (Combined Gas Law) in thermal expansion of the gas, but against a containment, it cannot, so pressure rises.  Since there's 7500btu of energy in that fuel mix, the end result PRESSURE of a given volume can be calculated.  Without doing too much math in detail, it would only take about 1/100th of a cup of gasoline for that tire's internal pressure to rise to 350psi... and there's plenty more fuel and air left.  IF the tire is strong enough, it would simply keep rising, and exceed 900psi.

How do you think the story ends?  It ends with the tire detonating.

Do this... take a good tractor tire... pour in some ether, gasoline, whatever... through the stem.  Pump it up to just 10psi.  Poke a hole into the tire with an awl, down to about a quarter-inch from the rim.  Ground the rim, connect the awl to an ignition coil.  Stand back about 400 yards, and give it a spark.

This is, by the way, a REALLY GOOD REASON NOT to weld on a wheel, if there's a tire mounted.  Some dumb@$$ using ether to mount the tire, and YOU end up a gelatainous goo on the roof of your workshop, alongside the hole that the rim left as it was launched to SpaceEx.

Dismount the tire first.

If anybody is still left reading. When did changing them still mounted to the axle start. Not that it was fun, but I was not bad with the bead breaker hammer. As I split a lot of firewood with 6 lb maul growing up. But after seeing a guy doing that to a wheel on my tractor just the wrong place/angle for me. They just need to be laying down. 

Had both rears replaced on a 1975 White 2-60 tractor that had original tires in 2010 or about. One had been leaking and run low a bit. It came off easy he had it done in a hour. The other one had very been low or leaked, he had 8 hours in that one. Maybe this was the job that pushed him from pot head to crack head. Last I heard he was a homeless living in the riverbed here, with all the other crackheads.

If you have screw type bead breaker  I can see it more. Add a hydraulic arm on a service truck to run around the wheel and peel the bead over the rim once it was started, is genius. This was a guy doing more earth moving tires than ag. But he would sell tractor and combine tires too.

Had a mobile home once loaded with furniture break the center out of the rim during a move and I welded this back together with the tire on alongside the interstate. I however did remove the valve core so no pressure build and did allow cooling time between stitch welding the center back to the rim. These centers were actually triple spot welded to the rim and they fractured. The repair didn't give a problem and never heard back from the party so assume it went alright on the balance of their move.

They did rent a U-Haul truck and lightened the trailer at the next rest stop as that was the second rim destroyed on the move and no spare immediately available on a later Saturday afternoon.  

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