How to Change a Tire

A lot of people seem to be scared to change their own tire, usually in fear of the car falling off the jack and the car landing on them or them forgetting to tighten the lug-nuts and the tire falling off while they are driving. As long as you do everything correctly, there is nothing to worry about.

Things you will need to complete the task

• Spare Tire
• Jack
• Tire Iron
• Brick or wood block to block your tire off.

How To Do it

• First off, you want to set your parking brake, whether it be a hand or foot brake, set it! This will obviously lock your tires. Next you want to get out your spare tire, tire iron and car jack. Before you even touch your flat tire, you want to wedge an object (brick, wood block or even a rock) under the opposite tire (if your front left tire is flat, block off your back right tire) in front of the tire and in back of it.
• Now that your car isn’t going anywhere, use your tire iron to loosen, but do NOT remove the lug nuts (the reason for this to be done before the car is jacked up, is because if you try to loosen them when the car is raised, the tire will just rotate on you, making it extremely difficult). Once the nuts are loose you want to raise the car with the jack.
• Be sure to place the jack on flat ground directly under the frame of the car, because that is the strongest part of the car. Jack the car up so that the tire you are changing is about 6 inches off the ground.
• Next you want to remove all the nuts that you loosened earlier, then simply remove the tire.
• You next want to put your spare tire on and a good tip is to push your foot into the bottom part of the tire once it is lined up. Then screw you lug-nuts on just finger tight. Once you have them all finger tight, take your tire wrench and tighten the bolts as hard as you can, but do it in a star pattern. Do the top nut first, then the bottom, then right, then left and so forth. There you have it.
• Be sure to get your tire fixed as quick as you can because spare tires are only regulated for 60 miles or so.