So, you need to change your tire…
Google provides this website as the first thing to pop up when searching for ‘how to change a tire.’ The first paragraph of the website features an unlikely situation and phrases such as “I have this nice cellular phone,” and “…rats…,” (not the animal) and even “you happened upon this web page the other night while frantically searching for discounted airfare.” Are websites on changing tires in the same category as discounted airfare? Maybe that was something that happened in 1997.
I felt the need to test this, searching Google for “frantically searching for discounted airfare” the first search result is in fact the website. However “discounted airfare” does not show up, even after searching literally 100 pages of Google.
Needless to say the website could use a an update. Before I go any further, I feel that you as the reader should know that I’m not the best with cars, I’m clumsy, and a little strange at times. Before writing this I’ve never thought that I could change a tire, and sadly I still cannot.
When I first got my car I named her Dee Dee, I suppose I had been watching too much Dexter’s Laboratory. The name later proved to be an accurate description of my car, Dee Dee always caused me trouble. The night I chose to change Dee Dee’s tire the weather had taken a turn for the worse. Muggy, humid, and miserable, with just a dash of rain.
If I have learned anything from this, it would be to have a sense of humor and always prepare for the unlikely. Almost being crushed by a car tends to make people rethink things. Okay, so it was just my hand that was almost crushed, scary but not life threatening.
Just follow these steps to avoid the mistakes I made, luckily I had my boyfriend Rocky Hoffman to help. I’ll just jump right into the steps instead of creating a hypothetical situation, adding in how things actually work out, or don’t as I’ve proven.
Ingredients for a well planned tire change (aka, the things you should already have):
-One car
-Hopefully four tires
-One spare tire
-One jack (thing that lifts up car)
-Metal hand crank (metal stick that goes with the jack, if you don’t have a hydraulic one)
– either one L shaped tire iron, or one X shaped tire iron (the X thingy)
-Car parked on a level surface
Recipe:
Step one: After your car is parked on a level surface you should probably go ahead and put on your emergency parking break. Otherwise when you try and jack up the car later the car may become angry at you for trying to separate it from it’s precious tires, like my car did. Hence my hand almost being crushed. Also if this is on the side of the road instead of in your garage or at your house for practice it might be a good idea to put your hazard lights on.
Step two: Find either the X thingy or the L thingy that will go over the lugs (the things that hold the wheel to the car). With the X shaped tire iron there are various size options, make sure that the one you will use to loosen the lugs is the right size. Hopefully the L shaped tire iron goes with your tire, otherwise you are out of luck in an emergency.
Step three: Now you will loosen the lugs, going in a star shaped pattern when loosening them. To loosen turn to the left, counterclockwise. I had Rocky to help me with this. As a side note, if one of the lugs is difficult to get off try spraying it with grease. The result of not doing this, you break off the lug, separating the peg that holds the lug from the car. Guess who only has four lugs on one of her tires now?
Step four: After the lugs are loosened find the jack, this goes under the car to lift it up. There is a metal ring that you will put the metal hand crank into and turn it to the right. If you are actually doing this it will become apparent that the hand crank will hit the ground, when this happens you must take the metal hand crank out of the metal loop and repeat the process above. Do this until your car is off the ground.
Step 5: Now the lugs should be easily unscrewed and taken off. As a warning, do not try to juggle these if you don’t actually know how to juggle. This may result in a head injury.
Step 6: Hypothetically, the tire should be easily pried off the car at this point. However it is at this point in my miserable dream crushing adventure that Dee Dee reared her ugly metaphorical head. Hard as I pulled, the tire wouldn’t separate itself from the car. Rocky also tried, but his efforts were also not successful. Even with our combined strengths Dee Dee still latched on to her tire. Sadly I had to give up.
Step all the rest combined: Had my car released the tire from her evil clutches the rest of this should have been a piece of cake. Take the tire off, put the spare on, hand screw the lugs on as tight as possible, then lower the jack. Lastly, take whichever tire iron you used and finish tightening up the lugs. Then dance a victory dance like you have never done before, because you have defeated the tire.
Needless to say, I didn’t get to any of those steps. But you can, after reading this, at least consider practicing changing your tire. In theory it seems easy, but in reality… Well that’s a different story. My last tip, don’t use your car’s manual for changing a tire, it reads like it was written by a computer as a joke, so the computers of the world could laugh as they watch poor pathetic humans struggle to get change their tires
