I will soon have a stack of about 16 alloy wheels that i will want to re-furbish. I really want to remove the tyres and then re-fit the best tyres from whats left. If i ask my local tyre place the usual fee is about £5 per wheel, so I was wondering if anyone has used the manual tyre changing machines, similar to this....

tyre machine

How easy / difficult are they to use for both removal and re-fitting???

And as for balancing, anyone got any experience of the 'bullseye' type balancers?

balancer

The reason i am wanting to do this is not for high performance road or race cars, just my tin tops. I have acquired loads of spare alloys that currently are worthless, but with some time and effort and tyres swapping will be useable and sell-able. But not if i need to pay out loads for removing and fitting and balancing. And there is then the hassle of getting loads of wheels to the tyre fitters.

So, any thoughts on these two bits of kit?

It's been a long time since I had to use a manual tyre changer and I doubt that time has made it any easier a job really can't recommend them much.

Cheers

Alex

have used a tyre changer like that except that the bead breaker was air powered and the part that held the wheel rim in place was air powered. i had to remove the trye by putting the bar under it and levering the tyre up and pulling the bar round the centre column. the only problem with them is that you can damage alloy wheels very easily as the bar used to remove the tyre can run round the rim and scrape the finish off your newly refurbished wheel (look at fig4 in the instruction download)

[Edited on 25/6/07 by davie h]

they do work and were widly used in the days of steel wheels. its all manual labour and the levering of the tyre is all done on and around the wheel rim which will result in some damage to alloy wheels

OK, thanks guys. Not what I wanted to hear.

If you put a piece of inner tube round the bar and use plenty of lubricant (washing up liquid) you will minimise the damage to your rim but it will not be as easy as the pictures make it look.

I made my own, although they are very similar to whats in the picture.

I made them specifically for changing motorbike tyres (obviously the balancer I made first was different!) and have done a few bikes tyres now.

I made a new balancer for car tyres in the middle of building my kit, and have tried it once and won't do it again! It was very hard work!

You can have the balancer for free if you want to collect it!

Steve

Thanks for the very kind offer, but it looks like i won't be doing any tyre swaps myself (yet)

no problem, it's yours if you want it!

It's only the balancer as I do use it on my bike wheels very effectively (and obviously have a specific balancer for those) but if you wanted the balancer I would show you how to make the breaker aswell - it was very simple!

Steve

We had a bead breaker that was a 5 foot piece of 40mm rhs with a piece fastened on about a foot along the length, the end wedged under a piece of angle rawl bolted to the wall and then you forced it down on the bead. It worked well enough.
Rescued attachment breaker.jpeg

Tyre machine...........£ 58.76
Balancer..................£ 45.99
Total......................£104.75 + aggravation

Garage @ £5/tyre....£80.00 - aggravation

No contest!

[Edited on 25/6/07 by Confused but excited.]

there are lots of ways to break a bead using readily available stuff like car jack under a sill jack point resting on the tyre you can usually get the bead off with the weight of the car. Bush method of re-fitting is lever on as far as you can then wallop the last bit with a decent lump hammer, high risk with ally wheels! There is frequently a little arrow or line on the sidewall that you set opposite the valve and this gives a reasonable static balance, OK to sell the wheels as the buyer should get a dynamic balance if he has trouble depends on kind of car and speed!

with hand fitting on alloy wheels fit from the back then chips and scratches are not visible, most machines can't do this with most wheels which is why they get scratched up.

Caber

You need to fit (and remove) the tyre from whichever side has the shallowest rim! You'll end up wrecking the tyre and probably the rim if you try to stretch the tyre over the deepest side!!