...Time was, I could just let the menfolk take it behind the shed with a shotgun and blammo! Problem well, not really solved; we'd still had to go to the junkyard and find a wheel with a decent-enough tire on it. In This Modern Age, it'll mean a trip to garage where I bought the tires. With any luck, they'll be able to stick a new stem in the thing and the tire will still be in good condition, or good enough; I can take it to work and maybe get a garage downtown to put it back on my car, thereby avoiding further messing-about with the teensy-weensy car jack, the itsy-bitsy spare and all the other saccharine bits and bobs comprising the tiny-car spare-tire kit.
Anyway, that's the plan.
Good luck, Roberta. One trick that a tire service pulled on my ex-GF was when she went in to have her tires rotated, they claimed that the wear on them from a mis-alignment was so bad that they couldn't be driven on further, and basically they held her car hostage until she paid for new tires to replace the worn ones.
ReplyDeleteI won't usually put up with that. I don't usually have to, either.
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ReplyDeleteYour recent pneumatic adventure re-ignited a thought I've had off and on...what car manufacturers include as a lifting device is often barely a jack.
ReplyDeleteAT home base I've got my choice of jacks, all light years better than the car mfg's, and if I know before hand of possible dire situations I pack for it. Day-to-day, however, I'm like everyone else: what came with the vehicle is what I've got.
Choices for alternates seem limited to hydraulic, scissors and screw; given that screw jacks are strong but a real PITA to use and have limited lift, and hydraulics will leak and become non-functional at the worst times, and especially that the perfect jack at 32PSI probably won't fit under the car when the rim protectors are at atmo (or retract enough to allow the toy spares to touch the ground), it seems I'm looking for a high quality, high capacity (3 toms or better) moderately compact scissors to supplement (or replace) the issue hardware.
Have you done any looking into this? If so, any ideas?
These two items are what ya need - not that expensive and a lot safer and stouter.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jeffro, but it's a 4WD pickup that's almost 5K lbs empty and sometimes 6.5K loaded. I'm afraid the bidding starts at 3 ton capacity.
ReplyDeleteI used to routinely carry a generic scissors jack in my MGB, as the supplied "jack" is actually an instrument to scratch and dent the side of your car when it pops out of the oddball engagement MG dreamed up and thought was a good idea in the face of all evidence against it. (You can tell if an MGB has had the manufacturer's jack used on it: a deep vertical scratch from the rocker panel upwards, at the center of gravity on one side or the other.) Back then, a smallish, decent scissors jack was a pretty common car-parts store item. Modern cars often have some kind of special jacking point with a seam down the middle of it, so you'd need a custom-hacked wood block to interface that with the saddle at the top of the generic jack.
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