When we were initially planning this trip in the summer/fall of 2022, we thought we would be meeting up with Ray and Chantal for a portion of the trip. Since they would be traveling in a car, we thought it would be easier to plan logistics of traveling together if we took the car instead of the motorcycle. So we decided we would take Rob's Mazda 3. As it turned out, Ray and Chantal were not able to join us on the trip, but since we had already planned our travel itinerary driving a car we decided to not make a change.
As of June 2023, the Mazda is still running on it's original tires which have 75k miles on them! However, they are getting close to the wear bars, so we would need new tires for the trip. Their arrival kicked off Rob's pre-trip maintenance.
It took him about six hours to pull off the wheels, remove the old tires and valves, clean the beads of each rim, install new valves, mount/balance the new tires, and reinstall the wheels. He has a pneumatic tire changing machine and tire balancer in his workshop.
A few pictures of the process for those interested:
After the old tire is removed, Rob likes to clean the rim to ensure good bead contact. This process takes about 45 minutes per rim as the bead area is pretty dirty and a lot of scrubbing is needed. The end result is a very clean rim ready for mounting. Tire shops do not take the time to do this step!
The rim and new tire are lubricated with tire mounting paste and the tire is mounted on the rim.
The tire is pressured up with air to get the beads to seat and then it is off to the balancing machine. The machine indicates the amount of weight the rim needs to balance it. Once the correct weight is applied, Rob runs the tire balancer again to double check that the wheel assembly is balanced. Zeros (0.00) for both sides (inside and outside) is what he wants to see. This wheel is balanced and ready to be reinstalled.
With the tires installed, Rob then took care of the Mazda’s scheduled maintenance by changing the oil, oil filter, and the front brake pads.
Once this project was complete, Rob gave the Mazda a good cleaning inside and out. Michele requires any vehicle she travels in to be in pristine condition. As she rightly deserves!
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