Is it worth having your own tire changer?

Why the hell would you bother? Every time I've bought tires in the last, oh, thirty years or so, the price *includes* mounting and balancing.

After getting burned several times having shops mount my racing tires, I bought a RC10A rim-clamp machine for $300. I've certainly gotten my money's worth from it. It's nice to be able to buy tires anywhere and mount them when you need them, rather than wait around hat in hand while the pros bend your rims, shred your beads, and destroy your TPMS sensors, all at your cost. I maybe use it once a year now that I've gotten lazier and racing less, so I'm thinking of selling it. But not yet. the electronic balancer though will probably go. Bubble balance works just as well, and it's much smaller. That big hood on the balancer just gets in the way. Now, if I could find one of those little "sawhorse" Snap-On units...

It is to me, particularly since I got my changer for free. Saves waiting in line for a grunt to scratch my wheel, or lift my car by its muffler, or open the door against the lift post, or install free grease on my seats and steering wheel, or balance my wheel while it's caked in mud on the inside.

I get lots of flats, mostly due to trash on the road dropped by desert rat pickups. When needed I'd do the changes myself and only hand over the wheel for balancing. On one mission a year or so ago I changed the tire, but put it back on the car for the drive to the tire shop. It worked perfectly as far as I could tell both before and after balancing. My conclusion is that modern lower-profile tires and alloy wheels have less need of balancing, so I'm not going to bother anymore on that vehicle unless I can detect a problem.

Wayne

stryped on Thu, 10 Jun 2010 06:04:18 -0700 (PDT) typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Depends on how often you need to change tires, and how much you would save (do not include your time and effort in that calculation.)

That said, buying your own tire changer setup leads to the situation where you think "what the hey ... we'll just change the tires; we've got the machine."

For me, it's being able to drive into my shop after work, change clothes, and change out the tires I got a great deal on a few months before. Otherwise, I'm taking off work or spending a boring Saturday AM in the waiting area, to pay retail price plus mounting and balance "Oh, and you ought to change those stems "... "Road Hazard warranty? Just $5 more per tire".

Places like Tire Rack (are there others?) are extremely cheap, but the installation adds something like $60 a set.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Everyone seems to be missing the point that this is Stryped asking.

Tire machines take fingers off of the incautious operator.

We don't want him losing fingers.

I say, "NO" Stryped. Let the tire guys change your tires.

LLoyd

I bought a little cheap (on clearance) tire changer from tractor supply, but still haven't used it. It's a manual changer, my brother worked at a gas station back in the day filling stations had full service, changed tires, fixed flats, wash & wax, etc... I changed some tires with their manual changer, wasn't difficult, the lube made a huge difference.

Then there's balancing... I wonder if a person made a spindle with encoder, mounted some load cells, and a motor to spin it up... with a microcontroller and a few hundred dollars worth of parts you might have an awesome spin balancer, and could even be cheaper with eBay parts.

I work in a tire factory and can get a significant discount on tires but the company has it worked out so we get our discount buying their brand tires from tirerack.com, then we have shipping and mounting and balancing. One of the local car dealers will mount and balance the tires for us for $10 per tire, the car dealer was cheaper than Wal-Mart, who'd have guessed? At work we have automatic dynamic balancers and I've worked on them for a few years, they have load cells on the spindle. The old version uses an airplane tire that is spun up with an electric motor and engages a wheel on the spindle. Then an air cylinder disengages the airplane tire so the tire and spindle is spinning freely on bearings and held in place with load cells. An encoder tracks the spindle position, etc. Anyway, I think with spindle bearings mounted on load cells and a little experimenting to see how weights affect the balance, a home made spin balancer would be a realistic home project. Largely due to the fact you can get hobbyist microcontrollers to do the instrumentation.

RogerN

That's an argument against pretty much all power tools, and even DIY. Besides which, I wouldn't be surprised if more people have been run over or dropped their car on themselves while changing a flat with a jack and a lug wrench than have been maimed changing their own tires at home with a machine.

Wayne

I think the tipping point for me was when Discount tire quoted me $75 to mount & balance 4 13" tires on 4 bare wheels that I brought in, "no hurry".

snipped-for-privacy@citlink.net fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

We frequently try to discourage Stryped from using anything A)heavy enough to drop and hurt himself, or B)with sharp edges or points, or C)Powered (by any means).

You must not know the history here...

LLoyd

If you feel that way then the best thing to do is let him learn the hard way. Although you might want to recommend a radial arm saw rather than a tire changer, which would likely take many lifetimes of home use to generate a bruise, much less a severed appendage. :-)

Still, best to make it clear that DIY dangers tend to be wildly overblown.

BTW, I got a nasty bruise from my abrasive chop saw last week. It was on the floor in the raised position, I bumped into it, and it fell over and pranged my ankle. I wouldn't have guessed it was even possible. I've probably worn out a 100 blades using that thing without a problem, and then it bites me when it wasn't even plugged in!

Wayne

The gun isn't loaded either Gerry :-)} London, Canada