I'd definitely go for the large single purpose bead breaker, it could save a lot of hassle.
Thanks for that advice.
I'm not going to disagree with you because I found that the bead breaker attachment to the tire-mounting tool is basically far too weak for these strong-walled 108T tires.
Nonetheless, since I didn't have the fancier bead breaker with me, I made do with what I had (after some quick popsicle-sticks American ingenuity temporary repairs)...
Since this isn't my SUV, I only have one wheel at the moment, so I took my time to document what I learned so that the next person who uses the same equipment can benefit from the 20/20 hindsight this tutorial provides them for how to use the harbor freight tire changer to:
a. Break the lower bead of the old tire away from the wheel
b. Break the upper bead of the old tire away from the wheel
c. Remove the upper bead of the old tire from the wheel
d. Remove the lower bead of the old tire from the wheel
e. Remove the old Schrader valve and stem assembly
f. Insert the new Schrader valve and stem assembly
g. Place the lower bead of the new tire on the wheel
h. Place the upper bead of the new tire on the wheel
i. Align the red (or yellow) dot to the valve stem (or to the wheel match-mounting mark)
j. Seat the beads by filling the tire with air
k. Check the valve stem clearance, match mounting marks, and adjust pressure to normal psi
The goal is that they start knowing all the things that I just learned today, which make the job far easier and which makes the tools work far better.
The first thing I did was straighten out the bent bead-breaking wedge bars, which was so easy to do one might conclude that they're actually made of rubber.
What the bead breaker shovel needs, from the start, is a bit of support, which is shown here (but after using it, I realized it needs to be about 2 inches from the top of the wedge to leave clearance for the rim of the wheel when breaking beads).
Luckily this wedge simply moved out of the way because it was just press fit in and wrapped with solid 120V copper wire. (Given more time, I would not weaken the bars any further by drilling bolt holes - but - I would strap in a rectangular block of wood instead of this fence post, which just happened to be handy.)
I started on the inside bead, which I'm told, is the harder one to break.
By moving the Clovis pin to the outside adjustment hole (making the angle about 90 degrees to the tire), and with this artificially strengthened wedge, I was (finally) able to apply (far) more force on the 108T tire bead without the wedge slipping off the bead itself.
The fence post got in the way of the rim as shown in this photo, so, if you permanently mount it, make sure it's shorter by about 2 or 3 inches than the space allotted, and make sure it's mounted up high and not low where mine is now.
Notice how the wooden block hits the rim?
You don't want that.
You want the block to stay higher up, away from the rim by a couple of inches.
But, in this case, it didn't matter because the block moved when pressure was placed on it.
The stronger wedge plus the 90 degree angle from using the furthest-out of the 3 adjustment pin holes allowed me to apply enough force to finally pop the inside-rim bead of the admittedly strong 108T tire sidewall.
Only after I popped the underside tire bead did I try to remove the lever arm, where I found that it bent at about a 10 or 15 degree angle. It took that much force, but you have to also realize that this harbor freight metal is soft as rubber.
After straightening the bent tire iron as much as I could, and after moving the clovis pin to the center hole to get more of an angle, and using a tire iron to keep a depressed bead down, I easily popped the upper bead.
Placing the tire iron flat step with the step side up, allowed me to start spinning the top bead off the wheel rim without lubrication:
Adding dish detergent helped a lot to spin the top bead off, where I'd say it's a requirement to have lubrication but everything gets slippery, even the tools, so try to keep it off the tools.
You repeat the process for the lower bead, with the tire iron again going in step-side up as in the first bead (the same way as it did for the upper bead).
Once the tire was off the rim, I cut off the old 1-1/4 inch tire valve from the underside with a utility knife, where the old valve was in surprisingly good shape, so I might have kept it had I not wanted to test out the 4-way valve-seating tool and the fit of the longer new 1-1/2 inch long tire valves.
After lubricating the new 1-1/2 inch valve with dish soap, I threaded on the 4-way tool and pulled it through so easily that it was shockingly simple.
Later you'll see I have a much better idea for a 4-way tool that I already have in my compressor toolbox, so I never needed the 4-way tool in the first place, but I didn't realize that until later.
Only later, when I was filling the tire with air, did I realize that a handy tool for pulling the valve would have been my compressor football/soccer-ball needle-valve tool, with the needle valve removed, which spins onto the valve threads with ease and which has a nice trigger handle to grab onto so that the valve can be pulled into place.
But I didn't think of this at the time I was seating the first valve, so, it's just a lesson learned for the future, and for someone else who happens to read this for hints on how to do the job if you don't have the 4-way valve seating tool (which is never needed but which is probably handy in an emergency and which is small enough to go into your compressor-tools' drawer).
The bottom bead of the new tire went on 3/4 of the way by hand, and then with a two-foot tire iron, the last quarter went on relatively easily.
It's important to remember to flip the tool and set the hook side appropriately because you're not going to seat the top bead unless you have the tool oriented this way exactly.
You'll want to ensure you seat the bead at the tire-valve first because that last quarter gets dicey where you have to use the most strength in the whole job, and where a slippery bar gets obnoxious.
I had to vise grip the end of the bar that I was holding because it kept twisting off the bead but with vise grips, it was manageable.
At the very least, you'll want to use vise grips to hold the slippery upper bead from slipping off as you try to force the last 1/4 of the upper bead onto the rim.
This is the point where you're extremely glad the tool is firmly bolted to cement, as the force is as much as you can give it.
Even so, I found I had to ditch the slippery but huge red pry bar and resort to two 24-inch tire irons to leverage the remaining upper bead over onto the wheel rim.
It's at this point, before you fill the tire with air, that you line up the red dot to the match-mounting marks, or, the yellow dot to the valve stem (if there is no red dot) or if there is a red dot but no match mounting marks, then you line up the red dot to the valve stem.
After doing that, I first removed the inner valve stem of the Schrader valve and tried to use my latching air chuck, but without the valve stem, the darn chuck wouldn't pass any air (so I gave up on this method).
It was dark and drizzly when I just decided to put the valve stem back in and put the latching chuck back on (although later I found a neat trick that I will try with the next tire).
It turns out that having the valve stem in or out really made no difference whatsoever, it seems, with respect to getting the air inside and getting the bead to seat.
The trick to seating the bead is really to have two hands free to hold the tire edges and jiggle, wiggle, coerce, tug and jerk the tire as it's loose when you're trying to get the bead to seat.
Once you get the tire in a certain position, you can just feel it starting to blow up, where it seats and finally pops a few times as you work up the pressure to 40, 50, and 60 psi.
The 4-way tool could have been useful here had it a blunt end instead of what they call a (sharp) pick, but that 4-way tool doesn't have a pin for letting the air out of the valve to drop the pressure down from 60 psi back to 40 where it belongs (which makes it less useful than it could have been).
Rummaging around in my compressor kit, I found this needle-valve which is normally used to inflate footballs and soccer balls, but which deflates the tire without sharp points like those that are on the silly and useless 4-way tool.
You can only have 20 pictures in a post so I had to break the post up into two parts.
