That’s what they call separating the rim of a tubeless tire from the steel rim it was made to fit on. It was quite thick and beefy, and more reluctant to go in place than it should have been since I didn’t bother breaking the bead on the inside face of the tire. Yanking the old tube out was easier when I removed the old valve stem to let all the air out, but getting the new tube in was difficult. I’d repaired this particular tire before, installing a tube to solve a recurring bead leak problem some years ago. The back tires on this lawn tractor were originally tubeless, so the tire was reluctant to come off the rim because it’s made to form an air-tight seal without a tube. I had that “Saturday-get-it-done” attitude going on. A new tube installed in record time was my plan. When I discovered the flat tire on my lawn tractor a week after topping up the pressure to the recommended max of 10 psi, I immediately bought a replacement tube from a great little local shop in town ($30). When Saturday rolled around, after I got my newsletter out for the week, I jacked up the tractor, removed the wheel, then started wrestling the tire off the rim with tire irons. Over the decades I might have seen only one or two bad valves out of dozens of flat tires. More often than not it’s a puncture or a leak where a tubeless tire meets the steel rim. That said, it’s easy to overlook this step because a leaky valve isn’t usually the problem. I’ve fixed dozens of tires since that day back in the 1970s, and I usually remember to check valves first. The prospect of a flat tire felt much more worrisome in my young mind than I see it to be now, but the relief of the repair done well was huge. Grandpa had taken us from being stranded at the end of the remote dirt road where our cottage was, to being back in business, mobile and free. No bubbles appeared after the valve replacement and I remember feeling an amazing sense of relief. Here it has been used to partially loosen the valve stem itself – the thing that holds air in the tire. The silver coloured tire valve cap has a little wrench on the end. You can see one of those wrench-equipped caps below and a partially removed valve stem. He unscrewed the old valve, put the new valve in, pumped up the tire and checked again for bubbles. This included new valve stems and the kind of metal valve cap with a little wrench on top for removing and replacing valve stems. Grandpa was the kind of guy who kept little things on hand so repairs could be done without going to the store. “If the valve is leaking, you’ll get little bubbles of spit showing up”, Grandpa explained. “The first thing you always do, Steve, is get some air into the tire to see if the valve is leaking.” He unscrewed the valve cap, inflated the tire a bit with a hand pump, put some spit on his index finger, daubed it on the open end of the valve, then waited. The first step in fixing any flat is to check if this valve is slowly leaking. All tires have valves like this one, covered in a cap that protects against dirt. One day when we were by the lake together for a few weeks, Grandpa showed me how to fix a flat tire on his car – a 1962 Ford Galaxy 500. He had six-quart wooden fruit baskets full of tools in the garage (I still have them), he kept little jars on revolving carousels to store screws, bolts and washers, and he built, fixed and restored many things around the house and cottage. Grandpa was an office worker his whole life, but like many office workers of yesteryear he was also surprisingly skilled with hands-on tasks. People generally were back then. I endured more anguish than necessary during the task, and I wasted money, all because I forgot something my grandfather taught me almost 50 years earlier. A few years ago I got busy fixing a flat tire on my lawn tractor, and the job took much longer than it needed to.
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