Wednesday, October 14, 2009

replacing a punctured tyre



i had thought every driver, especially male ones, would know how to replace a puntured tyre until i came upon this young man struggling in vain to remove the wheel nuts holding the 'injured' tyre. seeing that he needed help, i asked if he had a jack. he did but he was not sure where to place it. he asked if he could place it on the exhaust pipe. i told him he had to find somewhere where the metal was re-inforced, somewhere strong enough. in every car, in the undercarriage there are lift points, strong enough for the jack to hold the car up.


he finally got the car jacked up. as he started to work on loosening the nuts, i realised that he was not applying the principle of mechanics to remove the nuts. the angle was wrong and he was not using his body weight to work on the unyielding nuts. he had positioned the wheel nut wrench at too acute an angle and although he was using all his strength, it would not budge. it would seem to me that those nuts had never been loosened since the day they were put in place.




i helped reposition the wrench at a less acute angle and showed him how to use the body weight to advantage. i have often watched car mechanics doing it - stepping on the handle with their foot. using this method, he managed to loosened all the nuts. then, it started to rain and i left him to fend for himself.

after this, he would have to jack up the car a bit more so that the affected wheel was not in contact with the ground. this way, he could dislodge the wheel with the punctured tyre and replaced it with the spare tyre.

in the past, most cars came equipped with a four-way wrench called a spider. today, most cars come with a simple l-shaped wrench.


9 comments:

Icemoon said...

Both photos of the wheel are reenactment? How come the wheel lying on grass not tar and I thought yg left before the wheel was dislodged?

Victor said...

The van has very nice sports rims that look like they were swiped from a Honda car.

yg said...

hello investigators (v & c), photos of wheel for illustration only.

peter said...

I thot only woman-drivers cannot handle situation like this but men? Goodness gracious!

WK Tan said...

Hi!
About tyre punctures and
tyre-changing, have you heard
about the guy who had a puncture
just outside a mental hospital?

It takes too long for this
2-finger typist to type out the
story so i will tell you the story
the next time we meet.
Regards,
wee kiat
---------------

Victor said...

Haha. I thought WK was going to produce a stamp commemorating tyre punctures.

yg said...

wk, i heard this story before. the motorist accidentally dropped the 5nuts and the inmate from the hospital taught him to remove one nut from each of the remaining 3 wheels, and eventually he was able to fix the problem. when asked why, in spite of his creativity, he was in the institution, the inmate replied: i am here because i am crazy, not because i am stupid.

Victor said...

So the motorist finally found the missing nuts in the mental hospital?

yg said...

victor, i think one screw is still loose at the mental institution.