Last night, the spouse hit a kerb. Didn’t think anything of it.
This afternoon, she went to drive to the museum, and discovered we had a flat tire.
I tried re-inflating it to see how badly punctured it was. Once the pressure reached around 10psi there was an audible hissing noise, and the tire went flat in about 5 minutes. So, no going anywhere on that. Hence, I have just changed a tire on a car, for the first time in my life.
It turns out that car wheels are really rather filthy things, and so is the floor of our garage. Given that I’m not exactly the beefiest guy, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get the nuts loose, and it was touch and go on a couple of them. However, I exceeded my own expectations and got the job done without any mishaps, using the mini jack and wrench supplied with the car.
It’s probably time for a new set of tires anyway. We’ve done over 30,000 miles on the factory set, which I gather is pretty typical for a Prius.
Tagged: car, car wheels, flat, manliness, Prius, puncture, tires
2 Responses to “Rite of passage”
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March 15th, 2008 at 01:11 -0600
Ooh, congrats. I was just looking back through the prius entries to see when you’d picked yours up. I was surprised that you’d barely put more miles on yours than dabunny had on his.
March 15th, 2008 at 14:54 -0600
When you get the dud tyre replaced, make sure the wheel itself isn’t dented or buckled. Alloy wheels are surprisingly fragile in the face of such abuse as kerbing. If it were still on the car, vibration at speed would be the most obvious symptom, but I’m assuming it’s not at the moment. You should also get them to machine-tighten the nuts that you tightened by hand.
A length of metal tube threaded over the wrench’s handle is a good way of getting a little mechanical advantage when loosening wheel nuts, by the way.