A flat tire – it happens even to the best of us. Instead of using a car repair service in Beaverton to tow your vehicle to its shop, learn to change the flat yourself. Du Fresne’s Auto Repair, a favorite car repair service serving the Beaverton area, offers the following advice.
Sometimes you have the option of calling someone to pick you, leaving the car on the side of the road until the tow truck can come pick it up. But what if the day you get a flat, there is no one around to pick you up. Or what if it happens in an unfamiliar area, and you are not sure who to call. For these reasons and many more, you should learn how to change a flat tire.
Taking Off the Flat
First, you’ll need to find the jack, tire iron, and spare tire. Hopefully they are easily located and the spare isn’t flat. If it is, you’ll have to trash this plan and try something else. When taking the flat tire off of the car, make sure that you are parked on a level surface, the car is in park, and the emergency break is on. Before you jack up the car, use the tire iron to loosen the lug nuts. You’ll need some elbow grease, and remember: righty tighty, lefty loosey. Next, jack up your car. Your owner’s manual will have a good guide as to how to do this properly. Once the wheel is completely off the ground, finish loosening the lugs, and remove the tire.
Putting on the Spare
Line up the holes in the spare tire over the wheel studs. This may take some finesse, so don’t be discouraged if it takes you a couple tries. Then you simply reverse the process: tighten lugs by hand, lower the jack, and completely tighten the lugs with the tire iron until you can’t tighten them anymore. There you go. You don’t want to drive on the spare for very long and you’ll want to use a decreased speed, but it will be sufficient to get you to a car repair service in Beaverton or a nearby location.
