Tire Machines and Cantilevered Slicks

don-f

don-f

Well-known member
I was just wondering if any of the old manual tire machines work for taking on and off road coarse radials and the cantilever slicks? I don't live in a huge town and its been hit and miss with tire mounting competition tires. More miss. I tried several tire shops over the years. They all say no problem, then the mess comes back and they blame something, tires or wheels or both whatever they didn't sell me. I had some Revolution wheels scarred up pretty good a few years ago, one was a brand new replacement from England and the tires were new. They ripped the beads and gouged the wheels, new one included on that set. Recently a different business mounted some old cantilever slicks on very nice 13x7 Libre's so I can find out wheel spacing and roll in and out of the shop, and they either tore the bead or scarred the inside of a nice set of wheels. Either way there is a few that wont hold air. My project isn't ready for good tires yet, but I was just wondering as its been a constant problem and I have time to find something that works. I see some pretty beefy old manual tire machines for sale once in a while. I couldn't do much worse result wise.
 
wow. insane. I got tired of similar damage around here- or being charged $50/tire "because 15" race slicks are haaaaaarrrd!" so I finally broke down and bought a used Hunter machine and balancer off Craigslist for $1500 and now do my own. I taught myself via Youtube videos and some old junk tires and wheels I was willing to destroy.

note for the old cantilever slicks, they come off WAY easier if you just cut them in half across the tread (AFTER you break the bead!) then you pull one sidewall/ bead off at a time and it's pretty easy. Of course you can't do that going back on.
 
Thanks for the info. So just break the bead and use a saws-all to cut the bead and the tire casing? I'm not quite picturing the process. I will gladly do that when time for new tires as I don't want the tire shop to mess up the wheels more. Nice 13x7 aluminum wheels are getting harder to find and more expensive.

Yes I get tired of having nice wheels mutated. I was thinking about a manual machine because I could mount it on a small concrete slab outside and not hurt much with a good tarp. I would not want to do that with anything motorized. If it will not do the job well then it will have to wait. Real estate prices in Oregon have gone insane. I will probably end up relocating to another state for just this reason. As it is my small shop holds about twice as much stuff as its supposed to, I have to shuffle things into the driveway to work. It works for now but the plan is to finish up the projects and relocate.
 
Real estate isn't getting better anywhere else- except maybe Detroit.

2022 tax assessment told me my house's value went up over 100% since last year. !!!!!!! (Ya, we'll definitely be fighting the property taxes! that makes my taxes higher than my mortgage)

Saw another Prod racer post on bookface yesterday that the median home price in Austin is about $625k. oooof. Then again Austin is the new San Francisco and they're getting exactly what they deserve.

I hear you on the space thing. I currently have a 2 car garage and a small shop, 2 trailers to store and haul all the toys. I tentatively sold my EP RX7, but the [potential] new owner lives in Vegas and hasn't come to pick it up for months. I'm still shuffling it around between the shop, trailer, and garage every time I race the STU car.

The second trailer is for the racing go karts for the kids. those things multiply worse than rabbits (I will be up to 9 karts by end of this weekend)... when tires are only $220 a set and we get freebie takeoffs from a national team for practice, I have a small mountain of kart tires. at least the tire machine is tiny for that one and bolts to a small workbench in the trailer.

nonetheless, space is always an issue. I had to shuffle a bunch of stuff around to get the tire machine in the garage, and I roll the car outside when I'm doing more than a couple tires. I can work in the small space, but it's way easier when doing a set or two if I have the whole parking spot.

...... All this while the daily drivers are worth WAY more than some old beat up race cars-- they live in the driveway in the TX sun cooking away.


Back to the point of the tires and the machines.. I just use a good sharp box knife to cut thru the tread on the cantilevers. They use nylon/poly/aramid/whatever in the tread and have no steel belts, so you can cut thru them with a box knife. power tools not necessary. I just cut them straight down the middle and takes about 30 seconds a tire. If they're being difficult, I'll cut a 3-4" wide strip out of the center all the way around and then you have room to de-bead both sides before the sections of split tread mash into each other.

This makes life especially easy on the older tires that have gotten really hard. Also note you cannot do that on radials- there's steel belts in the radials. BUT the sidewalls on my 15x7 wheels are a lot easier to deal with than the cantilevers. eeeeasy to mount honestly.
 
I understand now you cut around the tire, not rim edge to rim edge. Thanks for the info!
 
yes that's correct. just cut around the tread of tire so you don't have to worry about the stiff sidewall and tread surface pushing the bead back onto the rim while you're trying to take it off.
 
Matt, You live in a beautiful sub division,$$$ houses and large acreage lots, with a HOA that keeps it pristine. While i live in the same county out on a county road and my taxes went up just like your. Totally unfair. While you are a wealthy Engineer who can afford anything his heart desires, i am just a senior citizen on SS.
 
Have used the cut method to dismount also.. Way easier.

When each tire becomes two sidewall rings and A 15x48 strip. They take up way less space. Razor knife, fresh blade. Cut before breaking beads. Be careful and cut away from yourself.

Save a few rings. Sometimes they can be helpful as a way to raise (or protect) the rim on a post tire machine. Every now and then a piece from a sheet can be used for misc projects.

Manual machines can be very, very hard to use. Not recommended.
 
OK thank you for the information. I will not waste the money on a manual machine. I thought it sounded like a good idea, but now I know.
 
When I did trackside support for Hoosier in the 90's I used an old Coats 10-10. Never had a problem before the fancy rim clamp machines came out. Just have to be handy with a pair of spoons and keep the bead down low.
 
quote="Larry Svaton"]Matt, You live in a beautiful sub division,$$$ houses and large acreage lots, with a HOA that keeps it pristine. While i live in the same county out on a county road and my taxes went up just like your. Totally unfair. While you are a wealthy Engineer who can afford anything his heart desires, i am just a senior citizen on SS.[/quote]
HAHAHAHA .. and then for the rest of the story... I may be an engineer, but I'm certainly not wealthy. I also have two young kids to feed and both race karts so that reduces my annual racing budget to about 2 sets of tires and entry fees at local races. Hallett is my big spender each year- especially when it's going to cost me $600 in fuel this year to get there. (Better hope nothing breaks!)

My house? another haha. We bought the smallest house in a hood when prices were affordable and the HOA was defunct; then we did a lot of work to it and made it decent. New developer later came in and started building 4000qt ft McMansions around us, driving the value of my little 1950ft house up dramatically. Now I'm paying higher taxes because of someone else's actions. We also have regular fights with the HOA just to keep the grass in the right-of-ways below waist-high. I'm not allowed to mow them myself, but they don't take care of them and we wind up with vermin and snakes in the yard and house all the time. The tax assessor seems to forget that every year and tries to double our taxes. so we spent days of work fighting our county government each year just to keep my taxes lower than my mortgage payment. so much for the Murican dream of owning your own chunk of land!
 
Larry Svaton":3lsfy43k said:
Matt, You live in a beautiful sub division,$$$ houses and large acreage lots, with a HOA that keeps it pristine. While i live in the same county out on a county road and my taxes went up just like your. Totally unfair. While you are a wealthy Engineer who can afford anything his heart desires, i am just a senior citizen on SS.
Click to expand...

What in blazes does that have to do with mounting/dismounting race tires?

Read the room, and go find an appropriate place to debate personal finances.
 
chois":2gm9gx66 said:
Larry Svaton":2gm9gx66 said:
Matt, You live in a beautiful sub division,$$$ houses and large acreage lots, with a HOA that keeps it pristine. While i live in the same county out on a county road and my taxes went up just like your. Totally unfair. While you are a wealthy Engineer who can afford anything his heart desires, i am just a senior citizen on SS.
Click to expand...

What in blazes does that have to do with mounting/dismounting race tires?

Read the room, and go find an appropriate place to debate personal finances.
Click to expand...
Chris, It's all good. I was whining about property taxes going up, Larry has oar in the same water on the other side of the boat. (he lives about 5 miles away). Just some friendly banter from the grumpy old man. ;)
 
I guess this is where that line about not getting tone from words typed on the internet bites me in the butt...

No worries, carry on.
 
Way back when, we mounted / dismounted non cantilevered 14" slicks (1970s) for my GP Datsun 1600 with tire irons and a bead breaker, no machine at all. Same with Sports 2000 then kart slicks, all non cantilever bias.

When I got back into Prod 20+ years later I took one feel of the sidewall/bead stiffness of a cantilevered 13" and said "Nope!!".

Somewhere early on I tried dismounting / mounting some steel belted radial street car tires by hand as above. I got about 2 or three done before quitting in exhausted disgust! It was possible but waaaaay too hard.
 
Since this has already drifted off topic. How much clearance should I allow between the strut and a 20x8-13 cantilever tire? I looked on the internet and there are recommendations from 1" to 5/16" gap. I want to suck the tires in further and narrow the flares. I did this a little before I tore the car apart many years ago and it seemed to help. 100 hp only goes so far. The car came to me with just sheets of aluminum pounded out for the bodywork. I want to make some cleaner looking fiberglass parts, but not before I get the tires where I want them.
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