Wrangling tires.

Put my garage to good use yesterday, and Sunday by opting to swap out my own sets of winter/summer tires. My wife’s GMC is by far the easier of the two vehicles to switch tires on. I have them all labelled so I know where I got them from, and where to rotate them to. Her tires are unidirectional so I have to follow the arrows in order to obtain all of the benefits from their design. The new vans tires are omnidirectional, and had no labels from the dealership, so I put them where I felt like it. No arrows, triangles, or wear patterns present to denote an orientation specific to best performance. I looked it up.

The nice thing about my wife’s car is that it has a long rail from wheel well to wheel well where 8 can place my jack. The new van only has four six inch wide spots available to put your jack. The rail is deep, and angled too. I had to switch over to my bottle jack, as my floor jack is too wide at the lift point, and the 2×4, or 2×4 I use to distribute the weight over a broader area isn’t deep enough to touch the interior of the rail and contact the jack, which deforms the body panels. But my bottle jack works just fine for that vehicle. It’s just annoying to have to switch between the two types of jack. I’d love to see how a shop would lift this type of vehicle with such a limited lift area to use. Must have a small/tall adapter of some sort. Like a hockey puck stack or urethane block to go up into the space. Seems needlessly limiting in my opinion.

The locking lug nut wasn’t too bad to work with. Seems our new van lugs are the same size as the old van, so I didn’t need to bring all my sockets out to test them to find the correct size. That was a relief at least. Which means I knew I had the correct size for both my breaker bar, torque wrench, and impact wrench sockets. Nice!

But I did do a number on my shoulder and my back, to one side anyway. Voltaren to the rescue. I took the time to power wash all of the tires, the new summer ones, and the winter ones as well. I’m just going to wait another day or two before I move them to let my back rest a bit. Tires on rims get heavy. For a lump of a man like myself, whom isn’t used to slinging weights like that around, I get pretty sore afterwards. Lifting tires with one arm to locate a stud and swing the tires into place required an awful lot of bending, twisting, and patience in yesterday’s early afternoon sun. I was sweating like a pig. I had thought about using my crowbar to help me lift the tire into place but I would get very angry if I poked a hole in brand new, never used summer tires trying to wrangle the damn things into the van.

No matter, I managed to get them all on, and torqued down to the correct spec’s per vehicle. 140 ft lbs for the GMC, and a mere 104 ft lbs for the van. Weirdly specific I think. But I’m no engineer.

Hopefully tomorrow I will be less achy and I can run the tires down to  storage for the summer months. I will see them again in late October or early November, weather depending.