Tale of a Tire

Sooooo...went to Harbor Freight and got my little winch for cheap.  You really gotta love that place.....they have practically everything, and at good prices.  If you don't mind buying stuff from China (and personally I don't care), they are hard to beat.  People in China need to make a living too!

Anyway, one thing that I had forgot to post was that my A-10 had a flat front tire.  We had aired it up when getting her ready to trailer in Washington, but the tire did not hold air.  So fixing the tire took precedence over installing the winch.

First stage...getting the wheel off.  I don't have a picture, but I will try to describe the situation as best I can.  The front of the A-10 has a fork, not unlike a bicycle fork, but shorter and beefier.  Both the tire and wheel spat (fiberglass fairing over the tire) are attached to the fork.  Picture if you can, the aircraft sitting on the trailer, with no real practical way to jack the front end up to work on it.

With only two attachment points it did not seem to be too much of a problem.  The lower attachment point was simply formed by the axle of the wheel, held on to the fork by two cotter pins.  Easy enough....pull the two cotter pins, and the axle will simply pull through, and the wheel will come off.

Here comes the problem.  The wheel spat has two small bolts also attaching it to the fork.  These bolts come through the inside of the wheel spat outward, with the nuts on the outside.  First I tried to just  loosen the nuts with a wrench, but they would turn along with the bolt, so this would obviously not work.  I felt for the bolt head on the inside of the wheel spat, and found no bolt head, just a smooth round piece of metal which I would not be able to get a tool on.

What to do oh what to do?  Not wanting to spend days on a relatively simple repair I decided to cut through the small bolts holding on the wheel spat.  A quick trip down the street to the Napa Auto store rendered up a hack saw blade.  Using just the naked blade I was able to slide it in between the wheel spat and front fork, and fairly quickly sawed through a couple of plastic bushings and the offending bolts.

Off comes the wheel spat and tire.

Fortunately for me....just a couple of more blocks down the street is the Tire Factory.  For the very reasonable sum of $5.50, the inner tube of the tire was replaced, refilled, and is now happily back on the A-10.

I love it when a project comes together.