ALT-1 How to Change a Flat Tire
You hope it will never happen to you but if you drive a car, and drive a lot, chances are that it will eventually happen to you at least once and while you have the option of ringing your nearest garage, mechanic, friend or partner to come and help you out, changing a punctured or flat tyre isn't as difficult as it seems.
For starters you must always make sure that you do indeed carry a spare tyre in your car and know where it is stored, it will be found either horizontally underneath the carpet of your boot in a submerged compartment, on the outside of the back door of a four wheel drive or sometimes even held with some special brackets on the underneath of your car. Make sure you know where yours is and also where your tool kit and car jack is.
A tool kit should consist, on top of elemental items such as a torch, screw driver, spare light bulb set, a spanner for removing and tightening the special nuts that attach your wheel onto the hub. Car jacks nowadays are usually hydraulic which means that very little physical energy is needed in employing them.
So when you are driving along quite happily and you feel that despite your travelling on a nice smooth tarmacked road the car ride is suddenly far from smooth but instead irregularly bumpy, you can more than likely assume that you have sustained a puncture to one of your tyres. It could have been due to a nail, a piece of glass or a pot hole there on the road but whatever the reason you should pull up to the side of the road and stop as soon as you can because the more you travel on, the more damage you will cause to the hub.
The hub is the aluminum frame over which the tyre is fitted and so if there is a puncture in the tyre and it becomes completely deflated it will mean that the actual hub will now come into direct contact with the hard surface of the tarmac which will deform it without the protection of the tyre.
Place yourself and your car well on the side of the road so as not to risk being hit by other cars put the red triangle that you always carry about 20 metres behind your car so as to warn other oncoming drivers that you are there and also put on your emergency reflective waistcoat. Make sure you have turned the engine off and that the hand brake is on.
You are now ready to start changing your tyre.
1. Put on a pair of rubber gloves and get out your tyre from its hiding place, plus the tool kit and car jack. Remove the hub cover - it should just pop out if you slip a screw driver under one of the edges.
2. Place the spanner over one of the nuts of the wheel. It will be quite hard to turn the bolt at the beginning so instead of using your hands kick down on the handle of the spanner with your foot. Just aim to loosen all the nuts but not to remove them yet.
3. Place the support bit of the car jack (it usually looks like a round suction mechanism) underneath a solid and flat part of your car so that it can't slip. Now turn the handle round and round and you should see how the car jack begins to extend itself and raise that side of your car upwards and off the ground. You only need to raise the car so that the tyre is just an inch or two off the ground.
4. Now once you have removed the nuts completely, usually four or five, you can now remove the tyre by gripping hold of the sides and pulling it towards you. It is a good idea to put it underneath your car in case the jack should slip so that your car falls down onto the tyre and not down onto the hard tarmac.
5. Immediately get hold of the spare tyre and position it so that it coincides with the bolts and once done take out the nuts from your pocket and one by one with the use of the spanner tighten them onto the bolts. To make sure that they are well and truly tight use your foot again on the handle of the spanner for the final turn.
6. Place your punctured tyre where the spare tyre was kept, collect your red triangle, take off your yellow waistcoat and you are ready to drive on but remember that driving with a spare tyre means that you have to keep to a special speed limit, usually about 60 miles an hour only.
And now you can feel proud that you have done all this on your own!
