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Hi, folks. I decided that I should inspect the innards of the tires on
my recently-purchased USMC surplus 1986 M998 HMMWV, in case the they
were damaged by being run on the runflats. I also decided to remove
the two-piece runflats for the time being, since they cause a lot of
wheel balance headaches. I haven't mounted tires before... knowing how
dangerous it can be to mount tires incorrectly, I decided to do it
"right" and get all of the proper tools and parts: inflation cage,
proper bead breaker, home-made remote inflation rig with clip-on
chuck, new lock nuts, new O-rings, new valve stems, tire soap, bubble
balancer, etc. Yes, I'm very, very stubborn to go to this much effort
rather than having somebody else mount them for me! :-)
I ran into a snag while remounting the first tire, so I decided it
would be most prudent to *STOP* and ask for advice before proceeding!
My truck has the old 8-bolt military rims, which use 36x12.5-16.5 LT
bias-ply tires and two-piece magnesium runflat assemblies. The
magnesium runflat does not have a separate bead lock; rather, the
inner part of each runflat half serves as a bead lock. The tire is
tubeless.
When I reassembled the wheel without the runflat, I found that the
bead came nowhere close to touching the rim. What is the proper way to
seat a bead without a bead lock to make things easy? In other words,
how do I get the tire to hold any pressure at all? Since I haven't
mounted tubeless tires before, I don't know whether other tires
normally "spring" their beads againt the rims enough to hold pressure
without finagling.
Here are some pictures of my tools and tires:
http://www.qsl.net/ke6myk/greentruck/HMMWVtires/toc.html
Once I figure out how to do this properly, and manage to successfully
mount and balance my tires, I plan to update the page with complete
instructions, with a lot of emphasis on safety. I'll probably also
re-do the pictures with adequate light! :-) Note that the URL for my
main web page is below in my signature, if you haven't seen it before.
By the way, the first tire I opened up appears to have been run on the
runflat, but the tire appears undamaged. It was probably just driven
with low but non-zero air pressure. At least one tire will need to be
replaced due to dry-rot and wear caused by an alignment problem, but I
hope the other two will be OK.
Thanks in advance for any help!
-- Mark J. Blair, KE6MYK <mblair1@home.net> PGP 2.6.2 public key available from http://pgp.ai.mit.edu/ Web page: http://www.qsl.net/ke6myk/ DO NOT SEND ANY UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL EMAIL TO THIS SITE
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