Fond Memories: Changing a Tire

It was very strange to me in high school when some students came into class 15 minutes late. They said they had a flat tire and had to change it.

“You changed a tire in 15 minutes?” I questioned, almost in shock.

They looked at me like I was someone from outer space, which was not unusual since I was very different from the other students in many ways, especially in my country-type upbringing.

My parents wanted me to have the best education they could afford and sacrificed to send me to a private Christian school. But my lifestyle and personality were on a more mature basis since I had grown up with no siblings around, nor other children to play with. I was mostly around adults throughout my formative years and learned to think like an adult early. I will expound on this more later. 

At any rate, they could not understand my disbelief, and I could not understand how they could have “changed a tire” in 15 minutes.

I had helped my Dad change a tire frequently over the years, and it was not so easy to do in 15 minutes.

When we had a flat tire, I had to assist my Dad and whoever was around in removing the tire from the vehicle. Since we didn’t have any mechanical devices, that, in itself, was sometimes a very hard undertaking. Most times, we would leave the vehicle sitting on the ground until the lug nuts were loose or removed. This helped keep the wheel from turning while struggling to loosen the nuts.

Next, using a crowbar, we had to extricate one side of the outer part of the tire from the rim. This was quite an undertaking as it is. I remember that once, my Dad and Uncle let me do this on my own to see how I could do. It took me quite a while. I struggled very hard, determined to show them, despite my gender and young age at the time, that I could do as well as anyone else.

After pulling the tire up over the rim on one side, we would then remove the inner tube that kept the tire inflated. That initiated a mystery, of sorts, because we had to investigate what caused the flat to occur. 

Dad had a tub of soapy water in his pole barn where we worked, and an air pressure machine to inflate the tube. Rolling the tube around and around in the soapy water until we could find the missing hole, which would bubble up, that had caused all this trouble. 

After it was found, Dad had some kind of special patching material he could melt onto the tire’s tube that would permanently seal up the hole. Some of the tubes had multiple seals on them from other “blowouts” over the years. I can still remember the smell of this patching process, which smelled of burnt rubber.

Then the fun started. You had to deflate the tube and put it all back together again using the same procedures and tools, only opposite. 

I never did time how long this procedure took, but I knew it was much, much longer than 15 minutes.

I didn’t know until later that most people would just keep a “spare” in the back of their car. What was a spare, I wondered at first.

And it wasn’t until I was older and had to use an auto shop to change a tire that I saw all the mechanical devices they used to do almost every step in the procedure I had learned by hand and muscle, and it was very fascinating to me. I wish I had the resources earlier to give these to my Dad to make his life easier.

Nevertheless, even though tires and tubes have changed over the years to be much simpler and easier, I am grateful that I did have to learn it “the hard way.” Perhaps it helped me to get that one piece of “determination” or “stubbornness” in my personality to show I could undertake such difficult tasks, to assist me in the future challenges I experienced throughout life.