Changing tires – marking tires

Most drivers have already changed their vehicle to summer tires. Finally, the temperatures are now good enough to bring the winter tires to summer quarters.

Who lets make this of the workshop and stores the tires also there has naturally no work and problems with it. But for many it is not worth it. The work of changing tires is not difficult.
And if you have a garage or a cellar you can store the tires comfortably yourself.

Sometimes it is worth it, because some garages charge quite high prices just for storing the summer or winter tires. Apart from the change then.
But changing and storing the tires yourself is not completely free either. One needs a little equipment. But often it pays off very quickly.

Jack

Very important when changing tires is of course the jack. Without it you can not get the car upwards. (Unless one has an appropriate stage at home… but he has the rest also.)
If one has a jack in the on-board tool one can take this for it naturally problem-free.
But modern vehicles often no longer have a spare wheel, and therefore no jack either.
For this one must fall back to a jack from the accessory trade*. But these are usually also easier to use than the one from the on-board toolbox.

Torque wrench

To unscrew the tires, of course, you have to loosen the wheel bolts, and then tighten them again. For this purpose a torque wrench* is useful. Because with this you can tighten the wheel bolt with exactly the torque as specified by the manufacturer. You do not damage the rim (steel rims can also be damaged), and the wheel bolts are not overstressed.
If you have tightened the bolts with exactly the right torque, you can be sure that the tires will hold. Of course, nevertheless, after a few kilometers tighten again for safety's sake.
The workshops usually use a pneumatically operated torque wrench. It is of course simpler and faster, but the commercially available torque wrenches perform excellently for private individuals and without any loss of performance.

Mark tires

It is important to mark the tires. Otherwise one does not know later any more which tire where was attached. And you should not change the tires wildly, but at most from front to back. (and vice versa).
For this you can z.B. mark the tires on the sidewall with a tire marker. Only this marking is very annoying if you have written it by mistake on the outer flank. Also, they can easily blur.
For this there are different solutions. Very convenient are these valve caps*, which have a marking stamped on them. In the practical set of 8, you thus have valve caps for both winter and summer tires. And these dust caps also contain a valve for tire pressure control.

Storage

Tires should not be stored upright. Flat spots can then form in the tire. You notice this later.
A rim tree* like this is ideal, for example. Here you can conveniently store the tires on top of each other. They also have distance to each other, which makes the whole thing even safer.

If one has this minimum equipment one can store and change the tires without problems itself.
In the long run, this is much cheaper than having it done at the workshop.