Custom Tire - Mounting to the Vehicle

Rick Robinson: Hi! I'm Rick Robinson with Springfield Motorsport and we're covering today the proper selection of custom wheels and tyres for your car. This is the installation process and if you've chosen to order a pre-installed set of wheels and tyres for your car, this is the point where you'll get involved with actually putting them on the car yourself. We mentioned earlier that we cover some of the safety aspects of that. If you're going to do this in your driveway or your garage, make sure that you've got the proper tools and that you know how to safely jack the car and remove the wheels from the car. You're going to use some basic tools.

First of all, something to remove the lug nuts from the car. Your car with a lug wrench, it's properly sized for the original lug nuts that are on a car. If they've already been changed once, it may not be the correct size and you make sure you've get the right socket. Now one thing about socket selection. The new custom wheels often have a recessed opening in the wheel where the lug nut is installed. You want to make sure that your socket fits comfortably inside that hole and that is not going to scrape against the edge of the hole as you install the lug nut, or you're going to chew up that nice new finish on your new wheels.

If you've got locking lug nuts or anti-theft lug nuts on it, and you make sure that you've got the key for that particular lug nut in order to be able to get it off the car. The tool that we're going to use to remove the lug nuts is called an impact wrench, commonly used in all shops that do this kind of work. If you're doing this in your garage or your driveway, you're not going to have this, again you want to make sure that you've got the proper tool that's going to work on your car. When we put the new wheels on, we're going to use the torque wrench to make sure that the lug nut is properly torqued for your car, and is not going to come off when you're driving down the road. We've got the car up on lift. Certainly, a handy device for doing this kind of work, gets all four wheels off the ground. We can go right through the process and get it done very quickly. If you're doing in on your driveway, you probably going to do this one wheel at the time with your jack and with the jack stand to safely keep that vehicle up in the air while you get that wheel off. We're going to use our impact wrench and get the all wheels off the car. First of all, we're going to take our locking lug nut, install the proper socket, and spin. Got the old wheel off the car, I'm ready to put the new one on. Again, with directional tyres you need to make sure that the direction of the tread is pointed in the correct direction for this particular wheel. Okay, we now get a new wheel up here, we're going to put lug nuts back on and making sure to that socket fits comfortably inside that hole and doesn't scar up your new wheel.

We'll get off all five lug nuts started by hand first, and then we'll snug them up. Now we'll go to our impact wrench and on a very low pressure setting we'll spin the new lugs on there. We want to alternate sides as you're doing it to make sure it tightens up evenly. We've got the new wheel temporarily installed. Now we're going to tighten it up with a torque wrench. Again, alternating on opposite sides of the wheel as you go to make sure it tightens up evenly and there we have it.

So that's a process for installing your new wheels and tyres on your car. Coming up we'll discuss disposal of your old rims and maintenance of your new ones.