As some of the previous Badland builders already know, the provided tires and wheels that come with the kit can be a real pain to put together.
I tried all kinds of methods and even purchased a small tire mounting tool from Horrible Fright. Today, I got my tires ready to go after I came up with a solution for the mounting of the tires.
This is my method, and it requires very little brute force and can be done without any tire irons at all.
You have to remove about 3-4 mm of rubber from the inside perimeter of the tire carcass. The tire has to slide easily onto the inside of the wheel half with no extreme force. I used a power drill and a rotary sander wheel to do this. The goal is to remove the material in a uniform fashion so I just constantly moved the drill around the perimeter of the inner bead. Do both beads on each tire. Do a little then test to see if the wheel slides onto the bead. It should slide on with just a little pressure. This step reduces the amount of force needed to assemble the two wheel halves onto the tire.
My biggest problem with my tire assembly was trying to prevent the tube from getting pinched in the gap where the two wheel halves meet up. This is how my tube got ruined on my previous attempts. There is just no room there to get your fingers to help tuck the tube out of the way. The white strip in the picture is my "Pinch Eliminator" Its just a strip of thick posterboard about 1 3/4 inches wide and long enough to wrap around the inside the perimeter of the wheel. Allow some extra length so there will be an inch or two of overlap as you wrap the strip around the perimeter of the wheel half.
Notice I cut a notch in the strip to allow the valve stem clearance.
I taped the area around the valve stem cutout so the paper won't tear as a manipulate it onto the wheel. I taped both sides with heavy duty strapping tape I had laying around.
I taped the strip together so it wrapped all the way around the wheel. Note, my posterboard was white on one side and black on the other.
I put some talc (baby powder) on the tube and inside of the tire. (You might be able to skip this step if you can't find any talc) I took the valve core out of the tube and inflated the tube to give it some shape since it was all flat from how it was packed for shipping. Stuff the tube into the tire and give it a blast of air to get it to conform to the shape of the tire.
Slide the tire/tube combo onto one wheel half, then slide the paper strip into the tire and get it to slide over the plastic wheel.
This is the hardest part of the process as the bead of the tire gets in the way. Don't be afraid to bend or crease the posterboard to get it to slide over the wheel half.
BE SURE AND LINE UP THE SLOT YOU CUT FOR THE VALVE STEM TO THE ONE ON THE WHEEL.
You need to get about 1/2 the posterboard onto the wheel, the rest of the posterboard will be for the other wheel half. I used the lip of the bead to help push the posterboard down to get it to uniformly slide onto the wheel half. The poster board strip should be about 50/50 on the wheel.
Now you need to slide the other wheel half over the posterboard strip and onto the bead of the tire. This would be about impossible if you did not remove any of the rubber as mentioned earlier. Again, be sure to pay attention to the valve stem slot in the top wheel half as you place it onto the tire. Notice the valve stem core is still removed here.
To help squeeze the wheel halve together, I used a long bolt (about 5/16 ) and a ton of washers to make a clamping tool to pull the halves together.
All the extra washers were needed since the random bolt I found in my stash did not have enough exposed threads to make this work right.
Then you just tighten the bolt to bring the two halves together. The poster board bridges the gap where the tube usually gets pinched as the two halves meet. I put the 3 wheel hub bolts into the wheel to make sure the two halves were lined up with each other. As long as the two valve stem slots slots in the wheel line up, the bolts should slide in as well. There was not enough of these bolts protruding to get a nut to start on them along with the aluminum disc brake carrier in place too, so I devised setup this to act as my helper.
You can see the three bolts are in place holding the disc brake carrier in place too. Tighten all 3 then remove the big bolt in the axle hole. Replace the valve core then inflate.
It took a while to figure this out for the 1st tire, but the 2nd went pretty quick for me. I took the pictures for this write-up when I did the 2nd one.
ALL DONE !!!!
on the threads. I would fly in anything you build with confidence! They are fine now, I snugged them down before taking out my helper bolt that was in the axle hole. I have about 4mm of threads exposed now. Almost spaced out on my 1st tire and left out the aluminum bracket. That would have been fun.