How to Change the Tyres of Your Car
The favourite saying of a tyre dealer is „From E to O“ which means, from Easter to October is the summer tyre time. That’s the time, where you should change the winter tyres to summer tyres or the other way around. Of course this means long waiting times, annoying appointments and annual costs. But if you want to avoid the whole thing, you can change your tyres yourself. Anyone who has a compressor with impact wrench and tyre inflator has an advantage here. If you want to know, how to successfully change the tyres of your car, you’re at the right address.
Where to Store the Tyres
Of course, you can have your tyres stored at the friendly tyre dealer for a fee. But let’s be honest: Tyres don’t take up so much space! If you buy (or build) a tyre holder, the tyres are stacked on top of each other, taking up the space of just the footprint of a tyre. By storing your tyres at home you also save annual storage costs, which can quickly cost up to 30 € per year.
Marking the Tyres
Maybe you have wondered why the tyres had white or yellow markings after mounting in the workshop. The professional marks the tyres before changing them so that he can mount them the same way for the next season. Why? The tyres sometimes have different signs of wear caused by different axe positions or track adjustments. This is not dangerous, but you will notice immediately if the tyres are not assembled in the old order. This can be felt by an uneven drive, or slight noises. Usually that disappears after a few hundred kilometers, but until then it’s really annoying.
Changing the Tyres
First, you should place your car on a solid ground, pull the handbrake and engage a gear. You certainly have a jack in the trunk but if you don’t you can surely borrow one from a neighbour of yours. Before you start to use the jack, you need to loosen all the screws with a wheel nut wrench or an impact wrench. That makes sense, because in the raised position, the tyres rotate and have no back pressure while loosening the screws. As a proud owner of a compressor, you should consider the purchase of a compressed air impact wrench. This makes tyre changing much easier. Now you need to place the jack at the right point and prop it up.
The screws should be kept in a box or similar so they don’t become dirty. Remove the old tyres, mark them with chalk and get the new tyres. First you tighten the screws by hand. Then you lower the jack, just the right amount, so that the wheels get blocked by the ground. The last thing to do is to tighten the nuts with the impact wrench crosswise. If everything is tightened, you can lower the jack completely.
With the tyre inflator and the integrated pressure gauge you can now adjust the air pressure. The corresponding data can be found in your car manual. By the way, you should check the wheel nuts again after about 50 kilometers. It can happen that the wheel nuts loosen a bit while driving.
That wasn’t that hard, was it? With the right tool, changing tyres every year is a piece of cake. In addition, you save money, which can be spend on something more useful, like new tyres.
