Changing a Flat Tyre

Many of us including myself, hate to have to change a flat tyre, even worse is when the tyre change is required in a very odd location, hopefully this blog will help provide some support in this much dreaded area of vehicle maintenance.

STEP 1 - Loosen the wheel bolts, this step of the process takes some effort since the wheel bolt would have been properly secured. It is most time advisable that you use your foot to assist in this process. You will need to ensure all wheel bolts are slack, but do not remove the nuts entirely.

STEP 2 - Raising the Car, in this step it is important that we understand at which part of the vehicle the jack is placed, it is normally on the undercarriage close to the wheel that you would need to change. This would require some manual labor to effect. 

STEP 3 - Removing tyre, firstly we need to ensure the surface is flat and solid enough to jack the car, install a chuck behind the wheel of the car, place the car in park and pull up on the hand brakes. In this step we remove all wheel nuts and take the entire wheel off of the car, there is no special order to remove the wheel nuts, but we want to keep them safe.

STEP 4 - Replacing the tyre, the spare tyre is normally found in the trunk of the vehicle. The spare tyre is installed in place of the tyre that was on the car previously, once the spare tyre is installed, we then need to replace the wheel nuts and catch all up by hand tightening.

STEP 5  - Lowering the car, the car is slowly lowered making sure your feet are out of harms way, the car is lowered all the way to ground until all the load is on the suspension of the car and no longer on the jack, once this is completed, the jack can be removed.

STEP 6  - Tighten the wheel, it is important when you tighten the wheel you follow a particular order - 4, 5 or 6 bolt. The purpose of following the wheel nut tightening order is to allow the wheel to be evenly secured thereby ensuring that there are no issues with misalignment of the wheel . 

Once completed you are DONE, Congratulations......

See the video for a summary of the 6 steps that have been shared