I admit that sometimes I’m entirely clueless. Today was a perfect example, for today I got my Desert Dogs mounted onto a 2nd set of Hurricane Rims that have been holding down the garage floor for more than two years.
The last time I got a set of offroad tires mounted on a set of rims was 27 years ago. Those too were desert dogs. I had inner tubes added to the tires so that the air pressure could be dropped to 10 – 15 lbs when jeeping; using inner tubes was a very normal thing to do.
So, now you will understand that when I pulled up to Les Schwab Tires (btw, Les Schwab, the company founder, was an early fan and seller of the Desert Dogs) and told the guy at the counter what I wanted to do, I didn’t think much of it. He walks out, looks at the rims, looks at the tires, and tells me he doesn’t think the tires will actually fit the rims. Frankly, he was looking at me like I just dropped in from planet Mars. Fortunately, I’m used to people looking at me like that. I told him that Les himself would have mounted Dogs to rims similar to what I had. He took it all in and seemed to think that maybe my request was possible. So, I asked him for an estimate to mount the tires and add inner tubes.
He gave me an estimate ($91 to mount and balance them) and said he didn’t know if he could get some inner tubes, because running inner tubes on tires like that would cause them to heat up and explode (the inner tube explode that is). Now it was my turn to look at him like he was from Mars.
However, to his credit, he was courteous the entire time and spent extra time attempting to locate inner tubes, finally finding four tubes at a cost of $38 …. that’s $38 a piece. After some quick addition I concluded that would cost me almost $160 just for tubes!! I told him thanks, I would see what else I could find for inner tubes.
So, I left, went home, and hopped on my beloved internet, hoping I could find a better price. After a half our of searching the internet and finding nothing, I had an idea. I would call Bucks, a local 4×4 shop, to see what they used. They said they rarely use inner tubes. The last time they used them, they got the tubes from Commercial Tire.
It turns out, in a world of tubeless tires, the use of tubes, once standard practice, has evaporated. Worse, no one told me!
My next step was to call Commercial Tire and see what they could do. The guy on the phone was helpful and said tubes would probably cost about $23 for my tire size, however I’d need to check the stem size of the rim as the tube price he was quoting was for a tube with a thick stem.
I figured I had nothing to lose, so I drove over to Commercial Tire and asked for some tubes. They looked at my stem size and determined I needed a rare inner tube. Several employees started making calls and one finally found four tubes at a warehouse somewhere and that was all they could find. The price would be $35 a piece.
I still thought that was crazily high, so asked them to just give me a quote on mounting the tires. They said they wouldn’t mount them because they were older than 6 years. So, my trip to Commercial Tire was a waste of time; and it confirmed that the world of tires had changed while I had been away from jeeps.
I left Commercial Tire and made the decision that I would mount the tires without tubes and give that a try. Since Les Schwab was willing to mount the tires, I decided to just take the tires back to them and get them mounted. Then, I took the mounted tires home and put them on the jeep.
So, maybe putting 18 year old shoes on Biscuit isn’t the smartest decision, but I couldn’t resist. They probably have 5000 miles of road wear left, maybe a little more. However, I had to do this to complete my image of what Biscuit would be: a fiberglass flattie with an old school look.
Here are a couple images of the new, old tires. I do prefer the pure aluminum color of the other rims, rather than having the black within the splines. So, I plan to polish the rims at some future point and take off that black.
