Dangers lurk in every corner when wrenching on stuff. This video shows the amazing and potentially deadly destructive forces that are released when a heavy duty tire is overfilled and blows up. I know two people who carry the permanent reminder of a truck tire incident. One was blinded permanently and the other suffered massive internal traumas and nearly died as a result of a tire exploding in their face. When I was in college working in the fleet garage a mechanic started to fill a tire outside of the protective cage and the guy who ran the shop went full nuclear on him and the guy almost lost his job. Why? This video will show you why. Watch what this tire does to a cage made of pretty heavy wall steel tubing. It mangles the thing. Visualize what the rim pieces would have done without the steel bars keeping it contained? Yeah,they would have traveled in directions and wiped out everything in their path.
Shop safety is often overlooked, even by us. It isn’t usually the glaring things that hurt or maim mechanics and hot rodders, the invisible enemies get us more often. You can’t see when a tire is about to explode and potentially kill you and when it does, reaction time is no going to save you. The video is pretty awesome to watch as it was shot in slow motion so you can really see stuff happening. Like we said above, the forces involved are mind blowing.
PRESS PLAY BELOW TO SEE A HEAVY DUTY TIRE EXPLODE AND WRECK ITS PROTECTIVE CAGE DURING THE FILLING PROCESS!
Ugh …. split rims. We used to drop the lift down on top of them before inflating. Still dicey ….
One time a guy brought a spare rim in to have a 16.5 tire mounted. While the tire buster was mounting the tire it blew off the rim and went straight up. Broke the tire busters arm and took out the space heater that was mounted on the ceiling. Turns out it was a 16 inch rim. Not a split rim story but still something worth being aware of.
Airing up split rims, cage or not, and trying to press off axle bearings are probably the two most dangerous shop tasks around. Sad to say I knew a couple of old mechanics who’d lost an eye to each task.
What pressure do truck tires get aired up to anyway? I’ve heard it’s more than passenger car tires but i have no idea of the PSI. Anyone know the burst pressure of a tire?
Yeah, years ago when I was an apprentice mechanic for a lousy shop (in retrospect) I was told to change a truck tire with a split-rim and I naively went about it,
But thankfully one of the older mechanics took me aside and told me of the dangers and what to do properly before I killed myself, it was a scary operation after he told me, but it went ok.
And 35 years ago I was pressing off a Corvair van axle bearing (tight suckers!) using proper heavy steel shielding, and the bearing violently exploded.
My left hand was up on the press lever and a small piece of bearing or race made it out from inside the shielding and went through my middle finger at an angle, boy did that hurt and bleed, and hurt for many years after that when the weather changes.
I was very lucky, and after that incident I started heating bad wheel bearings with a torch before pressing them off, never had a problem after that.
When I was in high school some 50 years ago, the father of one of my classmates was killed while airing up a truck tire on a split rim. At the time it seemed like such a freak accident but we learned it happens more than we knew.
I must have mounted 100’s of 20″ tires on split rims from ’79-82 had one ring come off at about 20 psi,in the cage,scared the !@#$ out of me but no harm done.
Co worker ,for some reason, was reinflatting an inner tire with a split rim and it came apart just as he put the tire gauge on it. He was using one of those long tire gauges made for the job and the ring must have spun somehow and cut the gauge in half when it all went bad. The ring also went in the sidewall of the outer tire and flattened that one too.
The little 16.5’s with the double ring scared me more than the 20’s,the ring for some reason just seemed harder to seat.
I know a guy who’s face looks like the stitching on a baseball because of a tire explosion. Truck tires are inflated to 120 PSI. The trouble in the video is split rims that have mostly faded from the scene, but I’m sure some are still around.
I worked in a gas station during college. Across the street was a truck service center. One day I noticed a worker at the truck place airing up a truck tire. He had the tire leaning against the outside of the cage and he was crouched inside the cage. It still makes me laugh to think of that scene.
Even modern one-piece wheels and tubeless tires can wreck your day.
Case in point: Years before I beagn driving truck, I worked in a heavy truck lube&tire shop. New tires, used, recaps….split-rims and dual-rings were absolutely VERBOTEN, so they weren’t an issue.
Had mounted a “new” Bandag 11R22.5 radial recap on a trailer wheel, secured in the cage(was also a shift foreman at the time, so adherance to all safety tenets went double for me)…..clip-on air chuck, remote pedal…whole 9 yards.
Approached 95 PSI(5 short of the recommended 100PSI), and heard what amounted to popcorn kernels exploding. This is known as sidewall “zippering”….structural failure of the casing. Tire ruptured within a nanosecond….blew the cage out(which was solidly anchored to the concrete floor), blew my uniform left-side pantleg out at the seamline from ankle to hip, rendered me deaf and knocked me backwards 20 feet into the side of the trailer this was going on.
Lost my cousin to an exploding split rim. It took part of his skull off. He was only 19. Still miss his nearly 20 years later.Miss you Brian.
Same principle, scaled UP…
We had a cargo aircraft land with a warning light on… wouldn’t de-pressurize… door was also stuck for same reason…
… bunch of the passengers were Marines… a few tried to grunt the door open…
The gruntiest of the bunch succeeded.. the door blew open, and it expelled him about 50 yards outside the plane.
He didn’t make it… he hit the doorframe on the way out.
I used to fix and mount tires for my fathers logging business. One day I was mounting a truck tire on a 3 piece split rim that just would not seat correctly. On some split rim designs, as you air the tire up, you can see the tire lip expand over the ring- this one would hang on the ring and not go up over it. After numerous tries up to about 50 psi, I showed my father and he tried. It still didn’t seat but he went ahead and aired it up to 110 psi. All was well until my uncle rolled it outside to lay it down. When it hit the ground, the ring blew off and sliced his hand very badly. The ring flew about 75 feet before hitting the ground behind the shop. He was lucky to only need stitches. The next week we had a tire cage….