I've had this tractor out here doing some backhoe work for the last couple of months, and was out here about to road this thing back to the store and came out to find the tire looking like this, completely flat and pushed off of the rim. When you see a tire like this, quite obviously coming out here with the air hose and trying to fill this back up again is not going to get the job done, so I'm going to show you a little bit here today how I'm going to get this tire back onto the rim, get the bead set and get it re-inflated.
Now if you're lucky enough to have a tractor with a loader, the very first thing you're going to use is use your built-in tire jack here, to use that loader to pick the front end of the tractor up in the air. Now once you've done this, you're going to see this thing is going to come a lot closer to sitting back here onto the rim, but if I come over here and I fill this guy up, I still don't have nearly enough of a seal here to actually be able to inflate the tire. The tire itself is just too far off of the rim to start to hold air and expand and fill the space here between the rim.
Now, you'll see some people go through and do an explosive method sometimes of setting this tire onto the rim by putting a flammable material back here inside of the rim and lighting it, and watching that thing explode, and that expansion then sets the tire onto the rim. That however is a little risky. I don't want to sing my eyebrows off here today, so I'm going to show you another method here using a ratchet strap. Now, what we are going to do is take this ratchet strap, wrap it around the tire and then start to squeeze the thing down. As we do that, as we push down here on the middle of the tire, the tire is going to open up a little bit and fill that gap enough that I can then get the air hose on there to start to fill it.
What we've done here is wrap the strap around the tire, hook the hooks down here at the end and pull a bunch of the slack out. Now I'm going to take this guy and just start to squeeze. When you do that, we're going to squeeze the tire in there against the rim and even with just a couple shots there at the ratchet strap, I can now take my air hose over here and actually start to build some pressure. I can see I've got some leaks there. I don't have quite enough volume in order for that to start to work, so I'll give another couple of cranks there. There we are, I can see the tires starting to move now.
As soon as you see that sidewall start to bulge out, you want to come over here and take this and release it right away. If you put too much air in the tire and start to expand that as that tire gets bigger, it just puts more and more tension on this strap. If you overfill it, you can find yourself in a place where you're not going to get that strap off or it's going to be really unpleasant there when it pops. Now, once I've got some pressure in there, now I can just take that air hose and continue to fill the tire. I can see now I've got about five pounds in it. This is my little baby air compressor here in my shop, in my garage. We've got that back on and reinflated.
Now, this is one of these things for sure that I know enough to be dangerous but I'm sure there's a lot of you out there that know more about some tricks with tires and stuff than what I do. If you have further suggestions for people on how to do this, is there an easier way than the way that I know, let us know down there in the comments, I'd be glad to hear your tips as well.
