Changing tyres on a 4320

[jamie_grieve]

How rusty was the wheel when you got the tyre off?
The others will be the same. The pad of the telehandler will be lucky to put 5 tons on the ground at the best of times and you need more than this to break the beads. Try a 20 ton jack under the counter weight at the back for more success. Don't try to take too big a bite and you only need to move the bead enough to get the locking ring off. Once you have blasted and painted the rims it's actually very easy to change the tyres, you don't even need to take the wheels off. As I said before, I use angle iron to do it most of the time, it will unseat all but the rustiest of beads due to how it works.

As mark has suggested, if you plan on doing this on a regular basis make something up for it but once you have painted the wheels they are really really easy to change. One word of advice however, never ever use washing up liquid as a tyre lubricant as it turns to glue. In fact fairy liquid is the best way to hold hand grips to motorcycle handlebars. It also has a high salt content and promotes rust.


The conventional 'truck forum' way to do a bead, In fairness, the angle iron was way quicker for me than getting on and off the machine to turn the wheel round.


You can use this technique to push on the rim flange behind the locking ring to break the bead and get a lot of force happening at once with a rattle gun.


I made this up to break the beads in two places


This is the other side of the press, this time pushing on an old tractor rim to push the tyre evenly onto a wheel that was far too small for it, in this case, a 16.00 x 20 onto a 5.5 inch rim. The press made this operation very easy and no dramas with fitting the valve or locking ring.

If your rims are really rusty the tyres might be bonded to the rim with no hope of release like some of mine. This rim had swollen 6-8mm and the tyre was stuck solid, I had to cut a few off. I took mine to the local opencast where they deal with big tyres on a daily basis, These tyres just laughed at their fancy bead breaker and I had to do them myself.


Have fun and keep us posted how you go.

[duncan]

For the valve, I use an end of thick fuel hose that tightly fits around the valve. Stick it over the valve stem, protecting it from violence and saving the thread. While mounting, loop it through the hole in the rim while you can still easily access it. Mount the tire and pull the end of the fuel hose, it will come out along with the valve

One word of advice however, never ever use washing up liquid as a tyre lubricant as it turns to glue.

In my opinion, you WANT the glue! Tire mounting paste is better than washing up liquid, but still, it turns to glue. The reason for this is that you need the rubber to grip the steel as much as possible, otherwise the rim will move inside the tire (especially at low-pressure terrain crawling), ripping your valves off your tubes.