Sorting out the rims and tyres

My original intention was to pull the tyres off the rims, clean and paint the rims, and then put the tyres back on.

However – when I took the wheels up to the tyre place to get the tyres taken off, the tyres started to disintegrate. The guys up there reckoned it would be downright unsafe to even think about putting the tyres back on.

So – I’m up for new tyres. The first cost, of course, was getting rid of the old tyres. $8 each to take them to the tip! But that was only the beginning.

I found some tyres on ebay, up around the Central Coast, advertised as

4 Dunlop Super Gripper 7.50R16LT 4wd tyres and rims
Great on and off road tyres with minimal use.
These 4 tyres have slightly different treds but the same rim size.

They looked OK, so I bought them for $70, thinking this was a bargain. When I got there, I found that the vendor was selling them for his father, and had never seen them. 2 weren’t roadworthy, one was marginal, and the other had good tread but was a retread. We did a bit of bargaining, and I ended up with another tyre in very good condition, the retread and the marginal tyre.

This still left me in a bit of a jam, so started looking at ebay again.

Then I found these

4 LIGHTLY USED 750X16 OLYMPIC STEELTREK RADIAL TYRES

These tyres are x australian army showing around  90% original tread. These tyres are steel radials and fit Landcruisers, Nissan and Landrovers. and most farm vehicles using this type of tyre, replacement cost $275 new each.

These came from ebay user mandt42, who lives in Cooma, and I would strongly recommend him. I got these 4 tyres for $320 for four, delivered to the transport depot in Wetherill Park.

Having got the tyres sorted out, I got the rims sandblasted then painted them with POR15. I’ll put up a page about POR15 some other time, but the summary of this stuff is – don’t bother. I should have had the rims powder-coated, it would have been easier and better.

Anyway, this is me doing the painting.

Having got the rims painted, I carted the whole lot down to the local tyre place and had the tyres put on the rims, balanced, and there we were, ready to go.

So now the tyres and rims are nestling down the bottom of the yard, under the gum trees, waiting to go back on the vehicle. It might have looked a tad better if they were all identical, but I’ll use the different one (from the Central Coast) as the spare.