The truth about tyre changes

COMMENT

Changing a flat tyre should be item #101 in every driver’s primary knowledge, ranking right up there with #102, tipping a jerry can into an empty fuel tank, particularly if you’re out of phone range of your local emergency service...

Apart from being empowering, it’s also a potentially life-saving knowledge when travelling on remote inland roads, where temperatures can soar, other travellers are scarce and partners can fume.

I’ve learned my lesson about fuel when running low, or running out, on remote inland roads. Your fuel tank range varies greatly with the type of tow vehicle, the terrain and how hard you’re pushing, but can be as low as 350km in the case of some mid-sized SUVs and ‘urban’ crew-cab utes when towing.

After some close calls, I always ensure I have a minimum of one third of a tank full and each 20-litre jerry can on my caravan carries at least 10-15 litres.

Why not the full 20 litres?  Well, a full ‘jerry’ is heavy for a ’mature’ person to pull vertically out of its cradle, particularly if the cradle is high-mounted on the back bumpers, as the two are on my Trakmaster Pilbara. (I once slipped off the bumper doing this with a full 20 litre jerry and cracked a rib).

Secondly, a full jerry is heavy to pour at chest height when tilted into a 4WD’s high fuel filler. (The best ‘deal’ I ever did was to swap a six-pack of Coopers Sparkling for 20L of diesel on the Tanami Track, with the diesel doner knowing full well that beer was unavailable in Halls Creek, where he was heading. So I now also carry a spare six-pack – only for this reason, mind you!)

Tyre dramas

But back to the tyres and why I recently spent nearly five unshaded hours on the side of the Birdsville Track changing a tyre in 43 degrees’ heat, while my wife fumed. Mea culpa. It was all my own fault.

For a start, I should have checked the tyres more closely on the D-MAX that Isuzu Ute kindly lent me for my recent cross-country towing trip from south-east Queensland to the bottom of South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula.

Had I done so, I would have noticed that the critical letters ‘LT’ (Light Truck), were missing in the tyres’ sidewall. This would have indicated that the tyres had a more robust carcass and sidewall construction that would have made them more resistant to stones on the remote Outback roads we were travelling.

Not that there was anything wrong with our D-Max’s 265/60-18 Toyo Open Country A33 rubber; it’s just that this premium alloy wheel/low profile tyre combo is better-suited to the leather-upholstered and up-specced LS-T than other more utilitarian models in the D-MAX range.

So we should have asked for 17-inch or even 16-inch diameter LT tyres. And we should have carried a mounted spare wheel and tyre, as we have done for both the tow vehicle and caravan on our previous major inland trips.

She'll be right mate!

We should also have familiarised ourselves with the wheel-changing equipment of the D-MAX before leaving home. This would have saved me the search through the owners’ manual to find that the equipment was stowed beneath one side of the rear seat – the one that our full Engel 45 litre fridge and Enerdrive 125AH Lithium battery occupied and hence, had to be offloaded before we could begin.

Then we would have discovered that the small bottle jack didn’t quite raise the rear suspension high enough on the side of the rocky road we stopped on to remove the wheel, and that the long folding handle that winds down the D-MAX’s spare wheel from beneath the load bed (a) had found its way into an unseen crevice beneath the seat and took some finding (b) it need to be assembled with a Phillips-head screw driver first, and (c) we had to disconnect our caravan and then crawl in the dirt beneath the rear of the D-MAX before we could insert the yoke to wind down the spare.

We would also have carried a small hand-pick (like the one I bought from Bunnings on our return for $22) to dig out a hollow in the concrete-hard Birdsville Track to allow even the deflated full-size spare to fit onto the rear hub after the jack was raised to its hull height. A screwdriver and a small hammer had to suffice and it was hard-going in the heat.

My wife’s helpful suggestion that I simply repair the mashed rear tyre of the D-MAX probably didn’t help. “Which hole?” I asked grumpily.

While we’re on it, make a note to always carry a 25-40mm thick wooden block to form a solid base for your jack if you want to gain more wheel-changing height.

No helping hand

Of course, no other vehicle passed during the time we were disabled, so I had plenty of time to curse myself for my lack of preparation.

On arriving in Birdsville I asked knowledgeable locals what they thought caused the puncture. Their guess was that a sharp stone had pierced the carcass between the treads and the deflating tyre had then been pinched between the rim and the road and destroyed.

Would higher pressures that the 27psi cold we ran in the D-MAX’s rear tyres have helped? “No” was the response of local roadhouse proprietor and off-road rally legend, Peter ‘Barnsey’ Barnes.

“Think how easy it is to pop a fully inflated balloon and how much harder it is to burst a partially inflated one,” he posed.

Next time I’ll be better prepared Barnsey, next time...

Also read:

Top-10 4WD mistakes you shouldn't make

The importance of pressure

Off-road tyre pressure warning