>I thought I was the only one dumb enough to have tried to beat a tire off
>the rim with screw drivers. I'd had so many spokes bent that I gave up
>letting garages to the work. You even managed to get a lot more carried away
>than I ever did.
You can't really consider yourself a dyed-in-the-wool car geek unless
you've actually done all of those stupid it-sure-seemed-liked-great-
idea-at-the-time things. Actually, maybe just owning a brit car is
sufficient. No rational person would do such a thing.
>I did discover that a Healey break drum or disc lowered onto the tire
>right by the rim makes a nice bead breaker. Radials whith their soft
>sidewalls are easy to pry off if the bead is broken. It the putting
>30lbs of air in with a bicycle hand pump that's hard.
Well, I didn't try this trick but I did have the van tire as close to
the rim as it was possible to get (rubbing). I even tried to get the
end of the crowbar between the bead and the rim while the van wheel was
still on top of the tire. BTW, this was a radial (Pirelli Centurato)
and it was about the toughest tire I ever come across. Also the rim and
tire together weighed a ton. I had these tires put on less than a year
after I bought the car. They were high profile 205/15. In those days,
radials this wide were kinda rare and they tended to be on the hefty
side. I would liked to have gotten another set of tires like the
originals but those guys were shot at 10k miles and that didn't seem to
practical to me at the time. They were Goodyear Bluestreak "stock car"
tires and were wide (for the day) low profile jobs. They had a simple
cross hatch tread and were noisy as hell. They were great on a dry
surfaces but really scary in the wet. They would break loose on a
section of road dampened by a lawn sprinkler. That was a bit more
stress than I could handled, especially after nearly plowing into the
back of a Ferrari in the rain on the San Diego Freeway.
Roland Dudley
cobra@hpcilsn.HP.COM
CSX2282
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