They do state that Stubbys Tire Tools are made from a “high quality plastic” and that their shape helps prevent pinched tubes and that they are not to be used with mousse foam inserts. I’d love to give you a rundown on the origins of the Stubby Tire Tools and a little bit of the company’s history, but alas, their website sheds no light on the subject other than to say that they are “designed by motoheads for motoheads”. This worked, but it required additional fiddling to keep my homemade rim savers in place and ultimately I did manage to nick the rear wheel once or twice anyway, much to my chagrin.Įnter a pair of “Stubby’s” to the rescue! I didn’t have any special rim protectors on hand, so I styled something from a plastic container scavenged from our recycling bin. I had a pair of the typical long, curved metal motorcycle tire spoons that were given to me by a friend, and I used these for my first “arm-strong” tire-changing practice session.īut, I knew if I were to use these on the rims of my 2002 BMW R1150GS (review) - or any other rim for that matter - without some method of protection, the metal rims would be damaged in the process. This reduced the down around time to nearly nothing.īut not everyone can afford, or has the room, for a tire machine in their work area or what if you have to dismount a tire while on the road? I later advanced to using either the No-Mar tire changer (review) or the Cycle Hill tire changer (review) at home. This extends to mounting my motorcycle tires for the past 11 years.īecause of the high prices the dealer charged me to mount and balance a set of tires, I devised a way to use the machines at work with the aid of duct tape to avoid damaging the painted alloy rims. Since those days of yore, all of the tires I’ve mounted have been with the aid of a variety of tire changing machines from the very archaic to quite exotic. If we were to use those same methods and tools today, we’d be buying some darned expensive light alloy rims for sure. Unlike most of today’s cars, almost all of these rims were heavy steel and all had wheel covers or hub caps, so it didn’t matter much if we nicked or scratched a rim here and there, since any damage would be covered up by the wheel trim. This involved use of a large, lever styled manual tire bead breaker, two large steel tire spoons (which I still have to this day) and a “BFH” (Big Frigg’n Hammer). It was a small, three person operation and we changed all of our tires by hand. ![]() The French certainly had a different approach to automobile design than the rest of the world at that time! The wheels on these unusual cars had no hole in the center large enough to fit the typical tire changing machines of that era and they usually had only three wheel lugs. They are a welcome addition to the tire changing equipment in my garage.Įarly in my career as an Automotive Technician (we were just “mechanics” or “grease monkeys” back then), I worked in a shop where we did a lot of service work on Renaults and Peugeots. Stubby Tire Tools are easy to use and they provide good leverage to get the job done without damaging your rims.
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