If you’re a car owner, you’ve probably encountered the situation where you need to change the tire of your car yourself. Even if this situation arrives only very rarely, troubling thing is that, it can arrive randomly anytime. It doesn’t respect whether you’re going to attend a wedding, fetch a cousin from airport or, meet someone important at the hospital.
So, learning how to change tire of your car is one of the easiest thing that you can do to attain the peace of mind while riding a car. It looks like changing tire supposed to be a tough job, it’s for though who have the perfect balance between their body strength and movement but it’s actually not. Otherwise, the skill to change a flat tire of car or a truck wouldn’t be be categorized among unskilled labor work.
Below, I’ve told you the easiest way to change tire of any car, whether big or small, whether the tire is new, worn out or flat. Scroll down.
How to Change a Tire on a Car
Firstly, park your vehicle to flat, levelled and traffic-free area where you can do the operation. Now, make sure, you have following things available in your car – a spare tire, a lug wrench and a hydraulic jack. These 3 equipment are necessary. So, if you don’t have them available yet, make them available first then start the operation.
How to Change a Tire Step by Step
Now, follow these steps to change the desired tire of your car –
- Turn on hazard light, apply parking brake to your car and put something heavy in front of your tire to stop it from rolling or moving.
- Take the hydraulic jack and place it under the recommended jacking position of your car. Check the manual or search online for your specific car model. You can’t place jack anywhere, it will damage the body of car. You need to put hydraulic press under the main frame (chassis) of your car. Only that can bear whole car’s weight.
- Start increasing height of hydraulic press. Slowly but steadily, it will raise the car’s height (ground clearance) enough that the tire you need to change will be up in the air.
- Take the lug wrench and remove all the lug nuts of the required tire. After that, remove the tire.
- Take the spare tire, mount it on this tire’s position and tighten up the lug nuts using wrench.
Now, you’ve successfully changed the tire of your car. Release the hydraulic jack pressure and put back the items in your car.
How to Change a Flat Tire
Changing a flat tire is actually easier than change a normal or worn out tire because it will be lighter to handle and remove. However, few things change. So, you need to keep them in mind while handling flat tire otherwise you might injure yourself.
If your tire is totally flat, it might have also decreased the height of your car at that place, making the closest jacking position inaccessible. Though steps to change a flat tire of a car is similar to above, here’s what changes –
- As the closest jacking position is inaccessible to risky to use, it is recommended to choose a location further away to place the hydraulic jack.
- Use the hydraulic jack to increase height of your car as high from the distant jacking location as you car.
- After this, add some bricks or iron stool around the mid length of your car. We will transfer car’s weight to this middle point to release the hydraulic jack.
- Now, release the hydraulic jack and as the car is raised, the desired jacking position is now accessible. Place the hydraulic jack here, raise it enough to secure the car and then finally, raise the flat tire off the ground.
- Now, you can follow the steps of above section about how to change a normal tire. That is, use lug wrench to remove all the lug nuts. After that remove the tire and replace it with a good tire. Then, remove the iron stool or brick that you’ve put the middle and release your hydraulic press.
Little tricky, but not something you can’t do.
How Long Does it Take to Change a Tire
If you follow the exact steps I’ve provided above, to change a normal tire, it’s going to take around 15 mins, for a flat tire, it’s going to take around 20 mins max. Any more than that means you’re doing something wrong or having hard time figuring it out. So, it’s better to just contact a car mechanic at this point. Even, if the car mechanic also charge rate according to the time it took, you now know long it should take to change the tire so you can confront him if he tries to delay things just to extend time to add to your bill.
How to Change a Tire without Jack
If you don’t have hydraulic jack then that raises stake quite a bit because it is an essential equipment. However, you can still change tire without hydraulic jack available along with you. Here are few ways by which you can do so –
- Ask other car owners or drivers to check if they can let you borrow their hydraulic jack for 15-20 mins.
- Rent a hydraulic jack from nearby repair shop. They might ask for security money if they don’t know you.
- Contact your friend of relative to bring it to you.
- Contact your favorite car mechanic to bring it along.
If you’ve exhausted these options and now, you need to finally change your car’s tire without jack, here’s the exact steps to do so. But, be very careful about your own and car’s safety.
[Steps] Changing A Tire of Car without Jack
- If you can take help from some people. Ask them to raise your car from bottom for few mins to place some bricks or stool at the boundary of your car to keep the desired tire raised.
- You can even use corner of a ramp to free up the desired tire.
- Once the desired tire is free from car’s weight and up in the air, you can use the normal method to change the tire of your car
- Take the lug wrench and remove all the tire’s nut. That lets you take that tire out. Replace it with good tire and tighten up the lug nuts.
- Now, make the car stable again by removing the support you’ve put on the boundary. Take help from nearby people, if needed.
How Much Does it Cost to Change a Tire
The cost to change a tire varies depending on your car and the situation or clause you’re in. Here are different cost estimates that will help you get an estimate –
- Check if your insurance covers it. Though rare but some insurance providers such as AAA or insurance add-ons cover tire changing service. So, if that’s the case, it will be free of cost for you.
- If you go to a car repair shop, the mechanic’s labor alone can cost you anywhere between $20 to $50. Repair cost excluded.
- If you contacted roadside assistance on normal business hours, expect a bill of $75 to $125. If it’s weekend or holiday, expect the service to be 20% more expensive.
- At the worst case, if you need to buy a new tire and then change your tire then depending on the brand, expect the total cost of operation to be around $150 to $200.
How to Change a Tire on A Rim
If you’re new, I don’t recommend you to do it by yourself because it’s a work of proper strength, technique and some experience with tires already. If you still want to do it then here’s the easiest way to change the old tire in a rim with new one-
- Deflate the old tire by removing the valve core.
- There’s a tight seal that keeps the tire and rim together. Break the bead. You need heavy clamp tool for that. Also, bead breaker tool is essential. Use proper technique to remove beads from one side of the tire, then another.
- Detach the old tire now from the rim and prepare the new tire.
- Lubricate the beards of new tire so that it will smoothly glides over the rim. You can use soap water for that.
- Use tire irons to guide both sides of beads onto the tire rim.
- Reinstall the value core, then inflate until you hear pop sound which confirms the successful install.
The tool, the techniques, the hardwork it requires in usually unreasonable to put for normal people. So, try to avoid changing tire on a rim by yourself. Giving it to car repair shop to do that will be reasonable at this point.
So finally, we arrive at the end of this article. Now, we’ve cleared the cloud and actually find out that changing tire of a car, whether big or small is not as complicated as you thought initially. If this article helped, share it with the people in need.
