Getting some winter rims/tires ready

So, last spring, LTGal suggested I look at getting a set of winter tires/rims for LittleTractor… Ones that I could fill with fluid (for extra weight/traction) and leave the chains on year round…  So, I tried buying two new rims on eBay.  I got ONE that fit a JD 160… and one that didn’t (it was actually for a JD 165, different transmission)…  After a long wrangle, I returned the incorrect rim, and resigned myself to not having winter rims…  Then, over the past couple of months or so, I’ve been yakking with another member of MTF, and he happened to come across another JD 160 rear rim, which (since, strangely enough, it DIDN’T fit his 165  ) he was kind enough to ship out to me… Thanks very much, Matt!So, here’s the rim and tire as I unpacked it out of the box last week.

A bit rough, so I went out and bought a few sanding supplies… Then, yesterday at about 10, I got a call from another MTF member (Greensail), who just lives about 7 minutes from me. He and I had been talking about whether we had any time over the August long weekend for me to get some help from him with taking the tires for BOTH my rims off (strangely enough, I’ve NEVER had to do that before)… He had a bit of time yesterday, so I hopped in the truck with BOTH rims and out I went. I have to say, Greensail has the single most AWESOME bead breaking tool I’ve ever seen! His Bobcat! Those tires never knew what hit them when he dropped the bucket on them!

Once the tires were off, then the big question was, how to get the rims cleaned up… I COULD spend hours and hours sanding them… Or Greensail could, out of the goodness of his heart, fire up his sandblaster!

Here’s BOTH rims, after 20 minutes of sand blasting!

The rim from Matt

The other rim…

So, next step is to really polish up around where the beads seat on both rims, do a bit more detailing and smoothing around the remaining good paint, then prime them and paint them with a rattlecan…

After that I start looking for some good tires to put on…

So here’s one interesting side note… When Matt originally took the pictures of his rim, it had a valve stem sticking out… When it GOT here it didn’t… I didn’t NOTICE the valve stem had disappeared when I first unpacked it… Then LTGal recycled the box… DOH! We were SURE the valve stem must have been somewhere in the packaging… Even after dumpster-diving for the box (she felt pretty bad about having been so keen to recycle), we STILL could not find the valve stem…

So, the mystery of the disappearing valve stem was not solved until yesterday, when we pulled the tire off…. Whatdyathink we found?

So, the depressurization and repressurization of the air shipping must have caused the valve stem to retreat into the tire…. Freaky, huh?