How to Remove Tires from Wheels

SSTJ

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Surprised not to find anything about this on the forum. Makes me think the answer must be: "Don't. Just take them to a tire shop."

Any pro tips on swapping tires? Watched a few YouTube videos but they all looked a little sketchy. So again, maybe it's worth taking them to a shop?

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Update: Consensus so far is that it's more work than it's worth. But if you're not in a hurry and want to try it yourself, here are the kind of tools you'll need. Or for removal only, consider one of these, or get creative and build something like this. Of course, mounting and balancing is another story.
 
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Curious to see what others say but I don’t think this is DIY task. More effort and time than it is worth if even achievable.
 
Used large tire irons and a lot of muscle to change tires on the steel rims of my Rovers. Was a total pain but I was determined and did it a few times before deciding it just wasn't worth the effort. One trick is to jack the truck up with a bare rim only installed. Place the tire/wheel you are changing flat on the ground carefully under the edge of wheel rim on the truck. Lower the jack slowly letting the weight of the vehicle pop the bead loose from the rim. Never tried it with tubeless tires.
 
I’ve done it a couple times, it sucks though. I usually would break the bead with a 2x4 and a high lift jack. I’ll put the tire under my rear bumper put the wood next to the bead and set the high-lift on that and start jacking up the jeep from the bumper. Get a couple of tire spoons and start working around the tire. Use some soapy water. That’s about all I have for advice. I just take mine to the tire shop nowadays to get the inners removed on my beadlocks. May cost a couple bucks but to me it’s worth it. They do it way faster than I can.
 
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That's actually an interesting question. I used to have a BMW 800GS motorcycle with tubeless tires. I took a tire tube on a holiday trip, just in case, and actually needed it to fix the torn rear tire. I laid the wheel on the ground and moved the bike on its trackstand onto the tire to pop it off. I knocked the valve out and put the tube in. Inflating it popped the tire back onto the rim.

I'm wondering if that's even possible with a car tire, I never tried. The recommendation in Australia is to have two spare wheels, but try to do that in a TJ. Punctures are easily fixed using plugs but anything larger will cause problems.
 
Years ago, I used to remove and mount tires all time by hand, not a big deal, as I got older bought a manual tire machine, that was better, then years later bought an old coats 10/10 tire machine air assist,that was really easy. Now I go to a tire shop getting too old to fight with them. You can get a cheap manual tire machine from harbor freight, that seems to work ok and would be a little easier than busting them down by hand
 
When i was 17 and 130lbs i used to change semi truck tires with two tire irons and a sledge hammer to break the bead. We used a sealing ring and a bucket of slime too during mounting.

I take my car tires to a shop.
 
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Any pro tips on swapping tires?
Pro tip #1.

Clint.jpg
 
I've manually changed motorcycle, car, truck, and tractor tires, but with one caveat - with most of them, I didn't care about cosmetics. Manual tire changing is tough to do without scratching rims. I'll still mount or dismount if I don't want to drive into town (I just put a plug-and-patch on my wife's car a couple months back and dismounted the tire to do so), and I don't care about rim scratches, but if they're nice wheels, I'll pay someone with a machine to do it. The few times I changed a tire on a nice wheel, I cut up a thick plastic orange juice container to make pads to put between my irons and the rims, which helps, but quickly becomes an "I need four arms" situation.

Also, as rancholago alluded, I'm getting up there in age and arthritis sometimes beats me down to where I'll pay someone else to do something I used to do!
 
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When i was 17 and 130lbs i used to change semi truck tires with two tire irons and a sledge hammer to break the bead. We used a sealing ring and a bucket of slime too during mounting.

I take my car tires to a shop.

Same here. All manual tools and labor. Back then, I could do 8 tires on a tractor or trailer in under an hour. Now that would kill me.
Any pro tips on swapping tires?

Assuming you're not talking about emergency/on the trail type of stuff, and you're doing multiple tires at home, you're going to need something to break the bead (big tire hammer, I think the one I used to swing was 12lbs), tools to remove and remount (spoons for smaller, golden toll for bigger), and enough air to remount and seat the bead (a cheetah and compressor). There are other tools and ways to accomplish the same, but these tolls are the standard for hand tools. Lots of labor, especially with big heavy tires.
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It is like most things. Every trick and tool works until it doesn't. When it does, you wonder what all the fuss is about. When it doesn't, you want to throw rocks at the folks that said it was easy. We've done a shitload. We have a small handful that made me want to burn the rig down, with the tires in the back seat, while the owner watched.
 
I worked in a service station one summer in college; I'll never forget "the tire guy" doing a split rim RV wheel/tire on the machine - something "happened" and one of the tire irons blew off the machine and went through the ceiling and the roof of the station - I think that tire iron is STILL in orbit somewhere. That incident gave me a healthy respect for the job and what CAN go wrong virtually "out of the blue"...
 
I had to unseat the bead on my old spare 35" GY MT/R once to try to improve its seal by cleaning it and using a bead sealant and it was a ROYAL PITA even with the weight of the TJ pushing down on the side of the tire. Never effing again without the right tool lol.

We were trying to de-bead a set of tires from Walker Evans bead locks. We had a Jeep park a front tire on one side, I was driving back and forth in a semi circle to keep the front tire of the diesel 1 ton tow rig at 80 psi right next to the rim. I had to move it back and forth about 10 times to get the bead to pop loose. Then we went to remove the bead lock rings. WE uses Time Serts, we couldn't figure out why the lock ring was lifting with the bolt. Turns out the owner did not use anti-seize on the bolts. The bolts seized to the inserts and the inserts were threading out against the underside of the lock ring. We had to unscrew each bolt about 2 turns over and over to fully lift off the lock ring. Then we had to put vise-grips on each insert, break the bolt out of it that way, make an install tool, reinstall the inserts back in the rim with red Loctite this time, then put the new tires on. There were enough screwed up inserts that we couldn't do the 5th rim after we plundered enough to get 4 done.

May not have been quite so bad but this was all done on the lakebed. After the first rim, I was looking for a can of gas and some matches.